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Book JA^ 

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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



EMERSON 



EM ERSON 



HIS CONTRIBUTION 
TO LITERATURE 



By DAVID LEE MAULSBY 



TUFTS COLLEGE, MASS. 
THE TUFTS COLLEGE PRESS 






Copyright, 191 i, 
By Lillian A. Maulsby 



1 1,^ 

'CI,A3<)<i758 



CONTENTS 

I PAGE 

THE DOCTRINES OF EMERSON 9 

II 
EMERSON'S STYLE 23 

III 
MODERN IDEALISM, GOETHE, CARLYLE ... 39 

IV 

MYSTICISM AND PANTHEISM 65 

V 
PLATO 83 

VI 
HERACLEITUS, ARISTOTLE, THE NEO- 

PLATONISTS Ill 

VII 
THE HINDU PHILOSOPHY 121 

VIII 
CONFUCIUS, ZOROASTER, PERSIAN POETRY . 141 

IX 
MONTAIGNE 155 

*^THE INFLUENCE OF EMERSON 163 

XI 
SUMMARY 175 



I 

THE DOCTRINES OF EMERSON 



All references in this book, not otherwise designated, are 
to Emerson's Complete Works, Centenary Edition, edited 
by Edward Waldo Emerson, 12 volumes, Cambridge, 1903. 



THE DOCTRINES OF EMERSON 

The central doctrine of Emerson is the immanence 
of God. All things, nature as well as man, are 
the phenomenal expression of spirit.' Further, 
this spirit is a beneficent will, pervasive, unescap- 
able.^ Itself eternal, the spirit expresses itself pro- 
gressively in the transient. ^ In one way of look- 
ing at it, the universe is illusion ; in another, the 
truest and soundest reality. The universe is at 
the bottom moral, because it is essentially God. 

^ " All the parts and forms of nature are the expression or 
production of divine faculties, and the same are in us." Works, 
VIII, 43. " As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the 
bosom of God : he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws 
at his need inexhaustible povrers." i, 64. " [The idealist's] ex- 
perience inclines him to behold the procession of facts you call 
the world, as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible, 
unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of him and of them, 
and necessitating him to regard all things as having a subjective 
or relative existence, relative to that aforesaid unknown centre 
of him." I, 334. 

^ " A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of 
souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary." vi, 27. 
" Gentlemen, there is a sublime and friendly destiny by which the 
human race is guided. . . . Men are narrow and selfish, but the 
Genius or Destiny is not narrow, but beneficent." i, 371. 

3 " The Times, as we say — or the present aspects of our so- 

9 



EMERSON 

A man may rise to a perception of this truth only 
occasionally ; or he may dwell in such atmosphere, 
almost without interruption : in either case, his best, 
his most reasonable moments are those in which he 
recognizes divinity at the centre both of the exter- 
nal world and of his own soul.' 

External nature means so much to Emerson that 
emphasis should be placed upon his view of it as 
the product of the Divine Mind. From boyhood, 
when he used to take off his hat to the God of 
the wood, through young manhood, when he turned 
from "the lore and the pride of man," to meet 
God face to face, like Moses in the bush, and on 
throughout the years of maturity and sense-decay, 
— the years of delighted afternoon walks in Con- 
cord, — Emerson received from the woods and the 

cial state, the Laws, Divinity, Natural Science, Agriculture, Art, 
Trade, Letters, have their root in an invisible spiritual reality. 
. , . Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great 
reason for the existence of every extant fact ; a reason which lies 
grand and immovable, often unsuspected, behind it in silence. 
The Times are the masquerade of the Eternities." i, 259. " The 
creation is on wheels, in transit . . . streaming into something 
higher." viii, 4. 

^ For an extended statement of these propositions, see iv, 
177-183; also lines prefixed to the essay on Worship: 

This is Jove . . . 

Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line. 

Severing rightly his from thine, 

Which is human, which divine, vi, 199. 

10 



DOCTRINES 

river and the sky a genuine contact with their in- 
dwelling spirit. In his early book on ** Nature," 
he expresses the faith that stayed with him always, 
that, though nature has certain advantages of a 
utilitarian sort, it yields higher service in the dis- 
closure of beauty, language, discipline, idealism, the 
eternal soul that inhabits all. 

The doctrine of the immanence of God is so 
substantially at the root of Emerson's philosophy 
that some expression of it, or of some corollary of 
it, may be found on almost every page of his 
works. One corollary is an unqualified optimism. 
If everything, physical and mental, is rooted in 
a Source that is absolutely good, there can be 
nothing that is absolutely bad. Poisons must exist 
for some good use.' The mistakes of nature are 
to be interpreted in the light of their manifest 
intention,^ The ills of life are for purposes of 
amehoration. Sin itself, since it is permitted, must 
have an ulterior, beneficent end. At worst, sin 
is absence of good, as cold is absence of heat. 
Emerson was not Wind to man's slow progress, ^ 

^ See the poem " Mithridates." 

^ '* If there be phenomena in botany which we call abortions, 
the abortion is also a function of nature, and assumes to the in- 
tellect the like completeness with the further function to which 
in different circumstances it had attained." viii, 158.. 

^ " How few thoughts 1 In a hundred years, millions of men 
II 



EMERSON 

but beholds this progress as constant. Life is an 
upward streaming, and death a blessing. If man 
cannot assert authoritatively that he will live for- 
ever, he can be sure that good will befall him, 
though the exact nature of the good be hidden. 
Let him try to deserve immortality.' But reason 
asserts immortal life. 

" In my frigidest moments, when I put behind 
me the subtler evidences, and set Christianity in 
the light of a piece of human history, — much as 
Confucius or Solyman might regard it, — I believe 
myself immortal. The beam of the balance trem- 
bles, to be sure, but settles always on the right 
side. For otherwise all things look silly. The sun 
is silly, and the connection of beings and worlds 
such mad nonsense. I saf this, I say that in pure 
reason I believe my immortality, because I have 
read and heard often that the doctrine hangs wholly 
on Christianity. This, to be sure, brings safety, 
but I think I get bare life without." ^ 

and not a hundred lines of poetry, not a theory of philosophy 
that offers a solution of the great problems, not an art of educa- 
tion that fulfils the conditions." viii, 179. 

^ See especially i, 122 : "If a man is at heart just . . . "; also 
VIII, 329, 330. 

^ See Cabot, p. 130. See also Emerson's reference to the 
death of his brother Charles, Cabot, p. 272. " 'Tis a higher 
thing to confide that if it is best we should live, we shall live, — 

12 



DOCTRINES 

The formal treatment of immortality is to be 
found in the essay under that title,' made up, as 
Mr. Cabot tells us, of passages written fifty years 
apart. The testimony toward the continued ex- 
istence of man given by his long belief in immor- 
tality through the ages, the mind's delight in per- 
manence, the old man's forward look, our pain at 
scepticism, and the utterances of great souls, is 
faithfully recorded, but the case, Emerson recog- 
nizes, is not proven. He would have us live, as he 
himself lived, in the eternal Now. 

Another consequence of beUef in the immanence 
of God is the famous doctrine of self-reliance, in 
essence reliance upon God. The human soul is an 
inlet to the divine soul. Under another figure, the 
human soul is lit by rays from the divine. Man is 
performing his normal human function when re- 
ceiving this ray of truth, without interposition of 
his own will.^ ** Not thanks, not prayer, seem 
quite the highest or truest name for our communi- 
cation with the infinite, — but glad and conspiring 
reception, — reception that becomes giving in its 

'tis higher to have this conviction than to have the lease of 
indefinite centuries and millenniums and aeons. Higher than the 
question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Im- 
mortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he who would be 
a great soul in future must be a great soul now." vi, 239. 

'VI, 323-352. ^1,371- 

13 



EMERSON 

turn, as the receiver is only the All-Giver in part 
and in infancy." - No man can receive all that the 
omnipresent spirit has to give, but in the relation 
of all to the divine each man is in a sense capable 
of doing and being what every other man has 
been and done.- Herein lies the possibility of one 
man's understanding the deeds of every other. 
The greatest genius is he who offers fewest ob- 
stacles to the illumination from above. ^ " Great 
genial power, one would almost say, consists in not 
being original at all ; in being altogether receptive ; 
in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit 
of the hour to pass unobstructed through the 
mind." ^ Let each person cherish and obey the par- 
ticular degree and kind of receptivity that he has. 5 
The men who have received from God most 

' I, 194- 

^ I, 91, 92; 107, 108. See also the opening sentences of the 
essay on History. 

3 II, 47 ; 83, 84. " Genius is in the first instance, sensibility, 
the capacity of receiving just impressions from the external 
world, and the power of coordinating these after the laws of 
thought." VIII, 207. 

^iv, 191. 

5 V, 271, 272, — example of the opposite — of conformity. 
See I, 63 ff, for extended exposition of the doctrine : " We learn 
that the highest is present to the soul of man ..." Besides 
the essay on Self-Reliance, traces of the doctrine may also be 
found in iv, i86; vi, 44, 213, 324-325; viii, 99. 

14 



DOCTRINES 

cordially are in the best sense representative of 
the race. Christ is one of these, in whom the 
perception of an all-pervasive divinity ''reached its 
purest expression." ' Emerson's attitude toward 
Christ is not, as some have thought, one of su- 
periority, or even of equality. But he sees that 
worship of God degenerates into worship of His 
messenger, and even of ritualistic formula and cov- 
enant. " Be Christs," he says in substance in the 
Divinity School address. "If you worship the 
person of Christ, you by that act remove yourself 
from your best endeavor to be like him." Nor do 
you honor Christ himself by exalting his figures of 
speech into eternal commands. Strive rather for a 
personal revelation. God has not made one rev- 
elation in Christ, and then closed the sources of 
revelation. He is revealing Himself now and con- 
stantly to all who are able to receive. The power 
that made Christ what he was, and in some degree 
shines forth in every great man, is ready to shine 
through you also, humble though you may be, and 
make you a law unto yourself. So shall a new and 
progressive religion be born.^ 

^ I, 126; III, 114. 

^ For Emerson's view of Christ and the Christian Church, see, 
besides the eloquent Divinity School address, i, 299; iv, 135, 
267 ; V, 222, 230, and Note. See also the Index of the River- 
side or the Centenary edition, and the chapter on Religion in 
Cabot's "Life." 

15 



EMERSON 

Two other prominent doctrines have derived 
relation to the central doctrine of the immanence 
of God. One is the law of compensation, the 
other the law of correspondence. According to 
the first, every fact in nature or human life has 
some compensatory fact which balances it, or holds 
it in check. The centrifugal and centripetal forces 
of the planetary orbits may here stand as example 
of such physical facts ; the value of high-priced 
labor from the standpoint of economy will illustrate 
the law in society ; the proud man because of his 
pride shutting himself out from what he might 
otherwise enjoy, will exempHfy the intrinsic nature 
of moral rewards. In the well-known essay on 
Compensation the doctrine finds most formal ex- 
pression, but it appears elsewhere — an organic 
part of Emerson's thought.' The complementary 
perception, without which the statement of the law 
of compensation is incomplete, is that virtue alone, 
of all mortal possessions, has no counterweight : it 
is an absolute good.^ 

The doctrine of compensation is, if not directly 
deducible from that of an ever-present and ever- 
provident Divinity, at least in line with it. Thus 

^ I, 39, 42 ; IV, 21 ; v, 167 ; vi, 22, 35, 47-48, 132 (end of para- 
graph), 161, 202, 251, 253. Cabot, 319. 

^I, 40; II, 112 ff ; VIII, 153, 

16 



DOCTRINES 

do the apparent discrepancies in the outward cir- 
cumstances of men find explanation and justifica- 
tion. Thus also does the pursuit of virtue, open to 
men of all circumstances, beckon with more per- 
suasive invitation. So with the doctrine of corre- 
spondence. This doctrine may be called Emerson's 
answer to the metaphysical inquiry touching the 
possibility of knowledge. How can mind appre- 
hend matter .? His reply is, from the common in- 
infinite cause of both, which has made matter to 
correspond or answer to mind, in some such way 
as the cogs of one wheel engage in the cogs of 
another. Under Emerson's own figure: ''That 
which once existed in intellect as pure law has 
now taken body as Nature. It existed already in 
the mind as solution ; now it has been precipitated, 
and the bright sediment is the world. We can 
never be quite strangers or inferiors in nature." ' 
Mind and matter are correlative, for both come 
from the same source. Thus our mental activities 
may be expressed in terms of physics, and physical 
facts are understood by the resemblances between 
them and intellectual facts.^ To add a further 
illustration : " The greatest delight which the fields 
and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult 

M, 197. 

^ In Chapter IV of " Nature," these analogies are illustrated in 
the use of language. 

17 



EMERSON 

relation between man and vegetable. I am not 
alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I 
to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm 
is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, 
and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a 
higher thought or a better emotion coming over 
me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing 
right." ' 

These, briefly stated, are the doctrines which the 
reader meets throughout the pages of Emerson. 
These are the fundamental ideas that determine 
his philosophy : that there is one God, who inhabits 
the world of nature and the world of man, in whose 
mind lie both the external universe and the universe 
of thought ; that in consequence the life we live 
and the world we hve in are wholly good, when 
viewed in their purpose and trend ; that man's 
duty is to follow the great of all ages in throwing 
open the windows of the soul to the leading that 
comes from above — a leading of which none is 
destitute ("Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to 
that iron string " ) ; that compensation and corre- 
spondence provide all advantages and ills in bal- 

^i, 10. See also iv, ii ; the latter part of the poem intro- 
ductory to " Fate," vol. vi : " The same correspondence that is 
between thirst in the stomach and water in the spring, exists 
between the whole of man and the w^hole of nature " ; vi, 89 ; the 
poem introductory to " Behavior," vi, 269, and the opening sen- 
tence of the essay. 

18 



DOCTRINES 

ance, except the supreme good, virtue, which is 
open to all ; and that man may heed his lesson in 
the world without or the world within, for these 
two worlds speak the same language. Not in a 
formulated system, but with undeviating fidelity, 
does Emerson hold to these few principles, espe- 
cially and always to the God — under whatever 
name — who is all in all. 



19 



II 

EMERSON'S STYLE 



EMERSON'S STYLE 

Before proceeding to ask how many of Emerson's 
fundamental ideas are derived, how many original 
with himself, it is proper that a literary discussion 
of the author should take account of his manner 
of expression. The style of a writer, considered 
in a large way, is an obvious component of his con- 
tribution to literature. For the style, though not 
always capable of exhaustive analysis, is accepted 
as in a true sense the author himself, and in the 
case of Emerson, if we must agree with Matthew 
Arnold that he is not one of the world's masters 
of phrase, it is nevertheless also true that the 
channels of his thought and his peculiarities of 
rhetoric help to characterize and render definite 
his individuality. Let us consider his manner of 
writing, first, in the larger aspect of his mental 
approach to his subject, and second, under the head 
of idiosyncrasies of form. 

A favorite designation of Emerson is ''the seer," 
and thus is suggested the quality of his mind which 
perceived truth rather than reflected upon it. In- 
sight is perhaps the leading characteristic of his 
mind. In his own view, as we have seen, his in- 

23 



EMERSON 

sight, like that of every other man, was dependent 
upon a receptive attitude toward the source of 
truth, which gave flashes of trustworthy illumina- 
tion. In any view, Emerson evinces insight in the 
ordinary sense of that term, as applying perception 
below the surface, into the inner nature of the 
thing. The following passage may be taken as 
suggesting Emerson's mental attitude, and its 
result : 

"A man cannot utter two or three sentences 
without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely 
where he stands in life and thought, namely, 
whether in the kingdom of the senses and the 
understanding, or in that of ideas and imagination, 
in the realm of intuitions and duty. People seem 
not to see that their opinion of the world is also a 
confession of character. " ' 

Emerson's inner ear was intelligent, his spiritual 
eye sharp ; and a man with a secret might well 
have shunned their penetration. But, having seen, 
it was no part of his disposition to doubt and 
prove. Henry James the elder complains that 
Emerson was ''absolutely destitute of reflective 
power." ^ The glimpse of truth that he enjoyed 
was trusted, and duly recorded. Nor did the dif- 

^ VI, 224. 

2 Cabot's "Life," 354. 

24 



STYLE 

fering views of his companions bring him over to 
their side, unless the inner witness approved. 

Naturally enough, the result of insight into the 
nature of a thing expresses itself in generalization. 
The perception of an inherent quality identifies the 
thing as belonging it may be to an unsuspected 
group of things. Such a mental state is far from 
that of the inductive philosopher, painfully heaping 
up a thousand instances to prove one law. The 
law is detected perhaps in a single instance, and 
straightway expressed. In Emerson's words : 
''Whenever the mind takes a step, it is to put 
itself at one with a larger class, discerned beyond 
the lesser class with which it has been conversant. 
Hence, all poetry and all affirmative action comes." ' 
Emerson, then, expresses himself largely in terms 
of higher generalizations, using concrete cases 
mainly as illustrations of principles. He seems to 
have sought concrete cases afterward, to give body 
to the large generalization he had already made. 

Now, it is not intended to assert that Emerson's 
trust in the immediate perception, and his distaste 
for reflection in the direction of a final adjustment 
of differences, rendered him callous to more than 
one side of the truth. His beUef in a compensa- 
tory fact for every fact led him to make, when it 

'V, 239. 

25 



EMERSON 

was possible, a statement on the other side, in com- 
pensation for a strong statement of what he at first 
perceived. In an interview held by the writer 
with Mr. James Elliot Cabot,' Mr. Cabot said : 
" Emerson was strenuously careful against what 
might seem any bias of his mind, or prejudice. 
He tried to be like a perfectly adjusted pair of 
scales, that would show instantly the presence of a 
weight in either direction. He would apparently be 
assailing in an essay somebody's ethical errors, but 
a comparison with his journals shows that presently 
the somebody attacked would be himself, in some 
mood that seemed to his afterthought to require 
correction." Not the search for a reconciling 
statement of apparently contradictory perceptions, 
then, was Emerson's, but a saying ''in hard words " 
to-day what to-day thinks, and to-morrow the same 
again, " though it contradict every thing . . . said 
to-day." The concluding thoughts of the essays on 
Napoleon and on Shakespeare show this balancing 
habit of mind, and also it appears in the course 
of the essay on Fate. In each case one aspect 
of the subject is treated at length, as if there 
were no other, only to be supplemented with an 
almost or quite contradictory view of the case. 
In the treatment of Shakespeare in " Represent- 

' Oct. 29, 1S98. 

26 



STYLE 

ative Men," the long favorable comment is so 
hearty and sincere that the damaging criticism in 
two of the concluding paragraphs comes with a 
sense of shock/ 

The tendency to balance is in line with Emer- 
son's pervasive but never explosive humor. He 
disliked loud laughter, though capable of finding 
excuses for it.^ In "Emerson in Concord," suf- 
ficient examples are given to prove that the sage 
had humor. He was not of those fun-less mortals 
of whom he said : '' They are past the help of sur- 
geon or clergy. But even these can understand 
pitchforks and the cry of Fire ! and I have noticed 
in some of this class a marked dislike of earth- 
quakes." 3 But his humor is rather something felt 
than seen. It is the humor of the optimist, not of 
the professional joker. It excites his own sincere 
but quiet smile. Because of its suggestive charac- 
ter, there is difficulty in discovering striking exam- 
ples of it in his works. '*An apple-tree, if you 
take out every day for a number of days a load of 
loam and put in a load of sand about its roots, will 
find it out. An apple-tree is a stupid kind of 

^See also on Wealth, vi, 85-127, and on the good and bad 
sides of travel, vi, 145-147. 

^viii, 162, 163. Cf. Indexes under "Laughter." 

^vi, 140. Quoted in "Emerson in Concord," p. 162. 

27 



EMERSON 

creature, but if this treatment be pursued for a 
short time I think it would begin to mistrust 
something." ' Seldom is the appeal so frank as 
this. After telling a ridiculous anecdote of Dr. 
Charles Chauncy, Emerson adds that the good 
Doctor once prayed that he might never be elo- 
quent, ''and, it appears, his prayer was granted." ^ 
We can imagine his spasmodic and silent chuckle 
at the Doctor's success in prayer. But in general 
his humor simply puts the reader into a good 
humor, like his own. It is never conjoined with 
pathos. Indeed, it would be impossible to dis- 
cover in all Emerson's writing an unmistakable 
example of the pathetic, so commonly met in 
writers at times evincing the complementary 
quality. The reason is that Emerson tempera- 
mentally shunned the mournful. His "Threnody," 
and the poems upon the loss of his brothers, 
are expressions of genuine grief, but in the 
latter part of the " Threnody " he rises into 
that serene realm which he inhabited. His idea of 
the comic was that it grows out of a perception 
of the absolute, the perfect, in the midst of the 
finite, the limited. ^ So it might rise to the level 

^vi, 104. 2 VIII, 128. 

^ " It is in comparing fractions with essential integers or wholes 
that laughter begins." viii, 157. 

28 



STYLE 

of a life-lesson in the apparently trivial, as in 
** The Mountain and the Squirrel," but never in- 
dulge in the rude contrasts provocative of loud 
laughter. 

Insight, expressing itself in generalizations, a 
determination to see both sides of the case, and a 
gentle but genuine humor, — these are some of the 
more obvious marks of Emerson's intellectual ap- 
proach to his subject. 

To turn now to the more formal qualities of 
style, one of the favorite complaints of those who 
have read a little Emerson, and who perhaps are 
impatient of any reading that requires concentra- 
tion, is that he is difficult to understand. The dif- 
ficulty grows mainly out of the frequent lack of 
obvious connection in the course of his thought. 
Yet this lack is commonly apparent, not real, and 
resides in the author's habit of addressing the mind 
rather than the eye. Emerson expects his reader 
to be thinking along the line of the discourse, and 
so not to need the finger-posts of demonstrative 
pronouns and relative conjunctions. Take for ex- 
ample the following extract from the essay on 
Compensation : " The wise man throws himself on 
the side of his assailants. It is more his interest 
than it is theirs to find his weak point. The wound 
cicatrizes and falls from him like a dead skin, and 
when they would triumph, lo ! he has passed on in- 

29 



EMERSON 

vulnerable." ' What wound ? The wound, of course, 
occasioned by the weapons of his friends. Per- 
haps a more difficult example is this, concerning 
egotism : " This distemper is the scourge of talent, 
of artists, inventors, and philosophers. Eminent 
spiritualists shall have an incapacity of putting 
their act or word aloof from them and seeing it 
bravely for the nothing it is. Beware of the man 
who says, 'I am on the eve of a revelation.' It is 
speedily punished. . . . " ^ What is punished } 
Not the revelation, which never comes, nor the act 
or word referred to by the previous neuter pro- 
noun, but the distemper of egotism, to find which 
one must skip a whole sentence backward, though 
it is the main topic under consideration in the con- 
text. The first paragraph of the essay on Manners 
deals with examples of barbarous nations, and the 
contribution in commercial products these nations 
make to the civilized world. The next paragraph, 
considering the obverse of the preceding, begins : 
" What fact more conspicuous in modern history 
than the creation of the gentleman ? " The con- 
nection is in thought, not language. 

Yet the language is as simple as the subject 
permits, if not the most carefully wrought in 

^ II, ii8. 



30 



STYLE 

coherence. '' In general, it is proof of high culture 
to say the greatest matters in the simplest way." 
Here is the poetical way of saying the same thing : 

To clothe the fiery thought 
In simple words succeeds, 
For still the craft of genius is 
To mask a king in weeds.' 

This is Emerson's own dictum, and his habitual 
style has a naked boldness that goes far to make 
his meaning clear. In this simplicity there is 
strength. He is not afraid of a homely compari- 
son,^ expressed in the language of the street, for 
he believes that as the writer rises in thought, he 
descends in language. ^ It is instructive in this 
connection to recall the difference in style be- 
tween the wild yet regular verses of Emerson's 
boyhood, together with such college essays as that 
on Socrates, and on the other hand the rude chords 
of Merlin's later harp, or the pregnant prose sen- 
tences of maturity. The Teutonic force of Emer- 
son's own manner is well illustrated in his para- 
phrase from Beranger : 

^ VI, 294, and Note. 

^"We must fetch the pump with dirty water, if clean cannot 
be had." vi, 60. 

^viii, 125. 

31 



EMERSON 

Mirmidons, race feconde, 'T is heavy odds 

Mirmidons, Against the gods, 

Enfin nous commandons ! When they will match with myr- 

Jupiter livre le monde midons. 

Aux mirmidons, aux mirmi- We spawning, spawning myrmi- 
dons, dons, 

Our turn to-day ! we take com- 
mand. 
Joy gives the globe into the hand 
Of myrmidons, of myrm.idons.^ 

All must feel that the smooth-sliding Gallic conso- 
nants have taken on the vital grip of a rude life. 
A bold simplicity thus brings power. ^ 

The purpose to speak to the point occasionally 
leads to exaggeration. *' People are born with the 
moral or with the material bias ; uterine brothers 
with this diverging distinction ; and I suppose, 
with high magnifiers, Mr. Frauenhofer or Dr. 
Carpenter might come to distinguish in the em- 
bryo, at the fourth day, — this is a Whig, and that 
a Free-Soiler." ^ " Punch makes exactly one capital 
joke a week, and the journals contrive to furnish 

'VI, 153. 

^ A drawback to simplicity, though perhaps a gain in empha- 
sis, comes from Emerson's occasional use of words in their 
Latin rather than their English meaning : flagrant for blazing, 
federal for sanctioned by custom, secular for lasting through ages. 
IV, 308, 311. 

3 VI, 12. 

32 



STYLE 

one good piece of news every day" ; ' " The poet 
squanders on the hour an amount of life that would 
more than furnish the seventy years of the man 
that stands next him " ;^ " In certain hours we can 
almost pass our hand through our own body " : ^ 
these are examples of unqualified utterance that 
are to be interpreted by their manifest intention. 
Non-scientific in spirit and terms, they need in the 
reading only a little of that saving humor and 
common sense that were their author's birthright, 
to lead no man astray. 

The aphorisms in which much of Emerson's 
wisdom is cast are due to his concentration of 
thought, and the spending in its birth of that pro- 
pulsive beat of energy that made each of his sen- 
tences "an infinitely repellent particle." Some 
of these maxims engrave themselves upon the 
memory. Many seem the final expression of their 
thought, in adequate and portable form. *' Poetry 
is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of 
the thing" ;4 ''A man is a fagot of thunder- 
bolts "; ^ <'What we pray to ourselves for is 
always granted";*^ "A great part of courage is 
the courage of having done the thing before ";7 

Wi, 1 8. 5 VI, 283. 

^viii, 17. ^vi, 40. 

^viii, 21. ^vi, 139. 

'^viii, 17. 

33 



EMERSON 

<' A course of mobs is good practice for orators " ; '^ 
" Why needs any man be rich ? . . . Only for 
want of thought " ; ^ " Every calamity is a spur," 3 
are a few of these. The last example suggests 
that the apothegm sometimes becomes a paradox. 
'' One of the benefits of a college education is to- 
show the boy its little avail," ^ and "The highest 
virtue is always against the law," s excite by their 
apparent self-contradiction the perception of the 
truth they convey. 

By such means did this Concord idealist climb 
to his expression. Not the flowing periods of the 
declaimer are here, but the sturdy sentences of a 
man whose chief care was to **hug the fact." 
Still, the essays, delivered as they at first were to 
listening ears, are starred with eloquence. 

It must be acknowledged that Emerson's elo- 
quence is not of the ordinary kind, implying great 
physical force and the sonorousness of open vowels. 
It is the expression of unusual thoughts in lan- 
guage of emphatic simplicity — the unexpected,^ 
both in thought and phrase. But its effect is com- 
pelling upon the receptive mind.^ A good ex- 



^vi,78. 


4 VI, 144. 




^ I, 244. 


5 VI, 238. 




3 VI, 36. > 






^VI, 320, 321 : 


" That story of Thor . . . ' 

34 


' Further, the close 



STYLE 

ample of the seer speaking at his best is the 
closing paragraph of " Illusions " : 

"There is no chance and no anarchy in the uni- 
verse. All is system and gradation. Every god 
is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal 
enters the hall of the firmament ; there is he aione 
with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions 
and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. 
On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms 
of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd 
which sways this way and that, and whose move- 
ments and doings he must obey : he fancies him- 
self poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd 
drives hither and thither, now furiously command- 
ing this thing to be done, now that. What is he 
that he should resist their will, and think or act 
for himself ? Every moment new changes and 
new showers of deceptions to baffle and distract 
him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the 
air clears and the cloud lifts a little, there are the 
gods sitting around him on their thrones, — they 
alone with him alone." ' 

So Emerson, who once wished to be a teacher 

of the essay on Power, vi, 8i, 82 : "I know no more arfecting 
lesson ..." Also on Money, vi, loi. Again, "Works and 
Days," VII, 184, 185. Probably the height of Emerson's sus- 
tained eloquence was reached (xi, 439-443) on Burns. 

'VI, 325. 

35 



EMERSON 

of rhetoric in Harvard University, that he might 
make orators, though as he said, he himself was 
none, pronounced in the course of his daily work 
passages of the most vital oratory, because the 
most sincere. They are sometimes like hammered 
brass, and less often like the flow of the running 
river. Always they are the original utterance of 
one who wrought out his own fitting and unique 
method of speech. As his own they speak to us 
with lasting power. 



36 



Ill 

MODERN IDEALISM : GOETHE 
CARLYLE 



MODERN IDEALISM: GOETHE: 
CARLYLE 

Having discovered the leading doctrines of Emer- 
son and some of the leading qualities of his style, 
we next inquire concerning the effect of his read- 
ing. The style of Emerson has appeared to be 
original, securing by its combination of strength 
and simplicity an axiomatic point the derivation of 
which it is almost hopeless to search for among the 
many books he read, if indeed it is to be found in 
books at all. Is the question equally hopeless : 
Are the leading ideas of Emerson his own ? The 
world had reached a fulness of years when he 
began to think and write. Centuries of thinkers 
and writers had preceded him. To utter a doct- 
rine entirely new was, a priori, a matter of great 
difficulty. Did Emerson succeed in striking out a 
fresh path on the complicated map of ideas, or was 
his mission rather to stimulate others to walk 
bravely in age-approved paths, as he himself was 
doing } In short, was he primarily a revealer, or 
an inspirer ? 

To answer this question will take us into the 
course of his reading, and it may be said here that 

39 



EMERSON 

Emerson's manner of reading was his own. He 
sought in books primarily the thoughts that, so far 
as he could tell, he already entertained. Or he 
sought concrete illustrations of such thought. Or, 
again, he sought stimulus and a working mood. 
That book he Uked best which put him into the 
frame of mind for work, and by work he meant the 
expression of such thoughts as, when heard or read 
by others, would in turn benefit men, by giving them 
the good hope which never left him, and by estab- 
lishing those foundations of faith which result in 
high and orderly living. 

The main lines of Emerson's reading, desultory 
though it was, were in the current idealism, with 
occasional excursions into mysticism and pantheism; 
in the philosophy and poetry of the Orient ; in 
Plato, with less important Greek philosophers, and 
in Montaigne. He preferred the poets to the 
philosophers, but it must be remembered that he 
called Swedenborg and Plato poets. From the 
English poets it is safe to say Emerson gained life 
rather than doctrine, — a stimulus to self-expres- 
sion. Wordsworth he never fully admired, though 
Wordsworth's view of nature as the gateway to 
God was not unlike his own. Shakespeare to 
Emerson lacked the moral elevation which will 
mark the Prophet-Poet of the future. From 
Plutarch, in the nature of the case, he culled anec- 

40 



IDEALISM 

dote rather than absorbed philosophy. From the 
preacher WiUiam Ellery Channing, whom as a 
youth he had heard with delight, Emerson received 
the truth that morality and religion blend, one into 
the other; from him he learned the progressive 
Right, revealing itself to every human soul ; the 
one-ness of each soul to its divine Source ; its 
power to receive Divinity and to grow ; the sacred- 
ness of the individual conscience, and the freedom 
due to individual thought. He found as well in 
Channing some things that he did not fully accept, 
such as a postulating of the unique nature of 
Christ, a special emphasis upon the Bible, and an 
unqualified belief in immortality. 

It will be sufficient, therefore, to confine our 
inquiry to the lines already laid down. Let us 
begin by asking what Emerson found in the 
current idealism, historically descending from 
Berkeley, and expressed with more variety and 
vigor in Germany, whence it was interpreted for 
English readers by Coleridge and Carlyle. 

A letter from Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, in 
answer to questions concerning his father's ac- 
quaintance with philosophy, says : " In college Mr. 
Emerson read Cudworth,' dehghting in his book 

^Emerson puts Cudworth among authors of the second class, 
in an abstract of a lecture given in Appendix F to Cabot's 

41 



EMERSON 

not for the writer's views but for what it told him of 
Plato and the older philosophers ; and he was thus 
led to their works. The ancient philosophers with 
their poetical ideas — Heracleitus, Xenophanes, 
Empedocles, Plato, and the Neo-Platonists, espe- 
cially Plotinus, — appealed to him far more than 
modern metaphysicians, for whose works he cared 
little. . . . He first got at the thoughts of the 
Germans (from Eckhart and Leibnitz down to 
Kant, Goethe, Oken, and Schelling) through Cole- 
ridge, in whose works he took great pleasure. . . . 
But it was the great poets he cared for as teachers 
far more than the metaphysicians. He classed 
Swedenborg and Plato as poets." 

It appears, then, that Emerson gave heartiest 
attention to writers of imagination, and that he 
turned more readily to the ancient than to the 
modern philosophers. This view is corroborated 
by a passage in " English Traits," ' in the midst of 
which, citing Berkeley, Schelling, Hegel, and many 
more as examples of men who lived on a high 
plane of thought, Emerson says : ^* These ... do 
all have a kind of filial retrospect to Plato and the 
Greeks." 

"Life," p. 715. Cudworth was the author of "The True Intel- 
lectual System of the Universe " (167S). See iv, 294, and Index. 

^P. 241. 

42 



IDEALISM 

Yet when a boy he had caught Berkeley's thought 
with delight, as a letter to Margaret Fuller tells us. 
" I know but one solution to my nature and rela- 
tions, which I find in remembering the joy with 
which in my boyhood I caught the first hint of 
the Berkeleyan philosophy, and which I certainly 
never lost sight of afterwards. ... I was not an 
electrician but an idealist. I could see that there 
was a Cause behind every stump and clod, and, by 
the help of some fine words, could make every old 
wagon and wood-pile and stone-wall oscillate a little 
and threaten to dance." ' The belief of Berkeley 
is hit off in another part of the passage from 
" English Traits " cited above : *' that we have no 
certain assurance of the existence of matter," ^ 

Moreover, throughout Emerson's works are scat- 
tered references by name, and occasionally by doct- 
rine, to the German philosophers of the Kantian 
school. " Build therefore your own world," say 
both Kant and Emerson. ^ Now and then Schel- 
ling is quoted.4 And Hegel's name appears oftener 
than any more explicit reference. 5 

^ Cabot's " Life," p. 478. 

^v, 242. 

3 Cabot's "Life," p. 261. i, 64; also, vi, 9. 

*v, 242; VI, 13. 

s But see v, 242. 

43 



EMERSON 

In fact, the use made by Emerson of the mod- 
ern idealistic philosophers is hke that he made of 
other books : he took what pleased him and let the 
rest go. Still, it will not do to let the case rest at 
this point. It is better to try to show how far 
Emerson's habitual thought agreed with the more 
prominent doctrines of modern idealism. We can 
see once for all that he made, in his writings, no 
attempt to enter into the difficult technical details 
of the several resultant philosophical systems. 

The name "Transcendentalist," used in a generic 
and modified sense, was one of the bequests of 
Kant's philosophy to the school of thought that 
flourished in New England in 1842; and in that 
year Emerson ascribed the origin of the half- 
derisive term to the Koningsberg thinker.' He 
harks back to Kant when he says : " Science has 
come to treat space and time as simply forms of 
thought";^ and still again when he accredits its 
author with his famous rule for moral conduct : 
"Act always so that the immediate motive of thy 
will may become a universal rule for all intelligent 
beings." ^ There is something more than acci- 
cident, perhaps, in the harmony between the em- 

' See " The Transcendentalist," vol. I. 

2 VI, 320. 

^vii, 27. This rule is in mind again in x, 92. 

44 



IDEALISM 

phasis which Kant places upon the absolute good 
that resides in a being of good will, a being who 
does his duty, and Emerson's assertion at the close 
of " Compensation " that the good man alone has ab- 
solute good. It is probable, however, that Emerson 
never read Kant in the original, and never mas- 
tered the outlines of his philosophy as a whole. 
Certainly there is no discussion of Kant's peculiar 
tenets when the connection of thought would make 
such discussion appropriate.' For one thing, Kant 
was no optimist ; for another, he believed that the 
only reward of virtue — the only manifestation 
of God's benevolence — is made to man's moral 
consciousness. The practical side of Emerson's 
mind saw the long-deferred reward of virtue be- 
come manifest in circumstances as well as in 
character.^ Emerson does not, like Kant, postu- 
late immortality; he waits to see the outcome of 
mortal life, assured that it is good. And, as we 
have hinted, there is no reference in Emerson to 
categories and antinomies, to the things-in-them- 
selves and to the transcendental unity of apper- 
ception by which a man's thoughts are organized. 
At the close of an article on Kant printed in 
The Dial when Emerson was editor of it,^ appears 

^ As, V, 238-244. ^ Close of " Compensation." 

3 April, 1844. By J. E. Cabot. See "An Historical and Bio- 

45 



EMERSON 

the following inclusive sentence : " His main prin- 
ciple, however, which he so courageously and philo- 
sophically upholds throughout — that we can know 
nothing out of ourselves — contains the leading 
idea of Modern Philosophy." While we know that 
Emerson was ballasted with common sense enough 
to prevent entire absorption in mysticism, we know 
also that he looked within for the best revelation ; 
and in this emphasis upon the inner life in which 
both writers agree lies their main resemblance, and 
in some degree the indebtedness of the later to the 
earlier thinker. 

Of the post-Kantians, Emerson is most closely 
related to Schelling, both in doctrine and tempera- 
ment. Yet it is difficult to say that this relation 
is derivative in character. Mr. G. W. Cooke ex- 
presses the case fairly : " It is not probable that 
Emerson was to any more than a limited extent 
directly affected by Schelling, but it is certain that 
much of what he has taught is to be found in the 
writings of this philosopher." ' We shall have 
something more to say of Schelling, a little below ; 
meanwhile as to Fichte. With Fichte's emphasis 
on duty as the key to knowledge Emerson would 

graphical Introduction to The Dial,'' by G. W. Cooke (Cleve- 
land, The Rowfant Club, 1902). 

^ " R. W. Emerson, his Life, Writings, and Philosophy," Boston, 
1882; p. 278. 

46 



IDEALISM 

find himself in sympathy, though it is doubtful if 
he could have entertained the problem as to the 
explanation of human knowledge in its strictly 
metaphysical aspect. Besides, Fichte takes a more 
social view of the universe than it was in Emerson's 
temperament to do. Fichte's figure of the vine 
and the branches as expressing the relation of God 
to men is as old as Christianity, but Emerson's 
emphasis is rather upon the relation of each single 
branch to its source. And Emerson's God is 
larger than the whole of human society. Still, he 
would agree with Fichte that two can work 
together only if they see the same world.' But 
Emerson, after all, accepts the universe more 
passively, as in essence absolutely good. He looks 
toward amelioration of present ills, but he is less 
assertive, less combatant, and as we have said, less 
social than Fichte. 

Hegel, again, with his constant appeal from con- 
sciousness to other consciousness, was still farther 
from Emerson's quiet contemplation of his own 
soul. There is no explicit reference in Emerson 
to a social consciousness. In Hegel's Absolute as 
made up of all series of contradiction and strife, 
there is a hint, but only a hint, of Emerson's com- 
pensation. And of Hegel's crabbed terminology 

' Royce : "The Spirit of Modern Philosophy," p. 153. 

47 



EMERSON 

we find no trace. It is true that there is at first 
glance a striking resemblance between the two 
authors as to the nature of history. Hegel sees 
fundamental consciousness coming to itself in 
human affairs. History, he says, is the content of 
God's consciousness. This doctrine sounds very 
like the opening sentence of Emerson's essay on 
History. And, if we allow for the suggestions of 
evolution that Emerson received from Lamarck 
and Oken, it is barely possible that we can assert 
a substantial identity between the two views. In 
his later years, Emerson read with pleasure the 
exposition of Hegel's doctrines made by Dr. J. 
Hutchinson Stirling, but Mr. Cabot says it was the 
style rather than the thought that impressed him. 
This judgment is strengthened by the letter which 
Emerson wrote to Carlyle, January 7, 1866, charg- 
ing Stirling (one would think truly) with having 
learned his manner from the beloved author of 
" Sartor Resartus." 

To come back to Schelling, as representative 
of the Romantic School of German philosophy : 
In Schelling Emerson found a congenial tempera- 
ment — not careful of consistency, impatient of 
system, fond of the concrete artistic expression of 
nature and of men. After all, Emerson, though 
he has been denied artistry, is at heart a poet, and 
always values words that are pictures, verses that 

48 



IDEALISM 

are '* Spheres and cubes, to be seen and handled." ' 
The " Identitats-Philosophie " is substantially Emer- 
son's. There is the thought world and there is 
the world of nature, apparently distinct ; but these 
two, says Schelling, are at base one. Nature is 
symbolic. There is analogy between the mind 
and the outer world, and in nature the enlight- 
ened may see spirit bodied forth. So in effect 
says Emerson. Both perceive an evolution of 
consciousness : 

. . . And the poor grass shall plot and plan 
What it will do when it is man. ^ 

Follow your genius wherever it leads, and change 
your mind when your heart changes. This is the 
message of both. 

In summary up to this point, let us say that 
Emerson caught the main idea of modern German 
philosophy, — the central reality of spirit, — and 
that here and there he echoed one or another 
minor idea of Kant and his immediate successors. 
But he was not primarily a philosopher, nor one to 
master philosophical systems ; and if the resem- 
blance between the utterances of Emerson and 

^ Preface to " Parnassus," viii. 

^"Bacchus": Poems, p. 126. "Plants grope ever upward 
toward consciousness." iii, 181. 

49 



EMERSON 

Schelling is strongest, it is because their person- 
ality was in the first place more nearly identical. 

The contact between Emerson and Goethe is 
closer. After his return from his first visit to 
Europe (1833), Emerson complied with the urgency 
of his new friend Carlyle so far as to make a man- 
ful effort to read the whole of Goethe in the origi- 
nal German. The fifty-five little volumes of the 
complete works used in this endeavor form part of 
Emerson's library at Concord. Considering that he 
had never before studied German, the task was stu- 
pendous. Yet we are told that his interest in 
Goethe grew, and in 1840 he was able to write 
Carlyle that he had " contrived to read almost 
every volume." ' 

Without doubt, in the multifarious German, 
Emerson came upon many illustrations of his own 
ideas. " It is delightful to find our own thought 
in so great a man," he wrote in his Journal, in 
1844.^ Goethe furnished, both in his life and in 
his works, embodiment of the views that Emerson 
labored to express. ^ But there was, besides, a 
bond between those two, much as in many respects 
they differed. This bond was, in a single word, 

' IV, 370. 

'IV, 377- 

3 See the Index to the complete works of Emerson, under 
" Goethe." 

50 



GOETHE 

the individualism of both. Goethe's aim, like 
Emerson's after him, was to live out his own life 
in his own way. Goethe, too, acknowledged that 
he sought his materials from a thousand persons, 
and borrowed unblushingly.' The main resem- 
blances between the two cease at this point. 
Goethe sought universal knowledge as a means 
to an end — culture. Further, in seeking to live 
his own life, Goethe descended to experiences that 
Emerson could not approve, much less imitate. 
For Emerson believed that " The foundation of 
culture, as of character, is at last the moral senti- 
ment.^ Thus, although there was always cordial 
recognition of the great German's encyclopedic 
attainments, to which the more slenderly furnished 
New Englander laid no claim, there was ahvays a 
serious qualification in the latter's admiration, sum- 
marized perhaps as well as anywhere in the sen- 
tence, '' Goethe, the surpassing intellect of modern 
times, apprehends the spiritual, but is not spir- 
itual." 3 Or, in other terms : 

" That Goethe had not a moral perception pro- 
portionate to his other powers is not, then, merely 
a circumstance, as we might relate of a man that 
he had or had not the sense of time or an eye for 

Man, 200. ^ VIII, 228. 

'XII, 45. 

51 



EMERSON 

colors, but it is the cardinal fact of health or dis- 
ease ; since, lacking this, he failed in the high sense 
to be a creator, and, with divine endowments, drops 
by irreversible decree into the common history of 
genius. He was content to fall into the track 
of vulgar poets and spend on common aims his 
splendid endowments, and has declined the office 
proffered to now and then a man in many centuries 
in the power of his genius, of a Redeemer of the 
human mind. . . . Let him pass. Humanity must 
wait for its physician still at the side of the road, 
and confess as this man goes out that they have 
served it better, who assured it out of the innocent 
hope in their hearts that a physician will come, 
than this majestic artist, with all the treasuries of 
wit, of science, and of power at his command." ' 
The same note is sounded many times.' 
A few examples wall make plain that Emerson 
habitually praised Goethe with moderation. "He 
is a poet, — poet of a prouder laurel than any con- 
temporary, and, under this plague of microscopes 
(for he seems to see out of every pore of his skin), 
strikes the harp with a hero's strength and grace. "^ 

^xii, 331, 332. 

^ IV, 284, 2S9, 369, 370. See also the remarks of Dr. Ed. W. 
Emerson in the accompanying Notes. See again, The Dial^ 
Oct., 1840, for the earlier form of ''Thoughts on Modern Lit- 

2 IV, 272. 

52 



GOETHE 

In the Journal of 1837, Emerson agrees that 
Goethe's opinions are generally right, but takes 
exception to his estimate of Sterne and perhaps of 
Byron.' One must read this pivotal writer if one 
would not be an old fogy,^ although there is always 
the suspicion that he is not quite sincere, but 
striving to astonish the reader.^ As to literary 
criticism, Emerson never liked the first part of 
"Faust." He terms its method " introversive," 
which apparently means that the ego is viciously 
emphasized. Yet he calls Mephistopheles the first 
organic figure that has been added to literature for 
ages, one which will remain as long as Prometheus.-^ 
The second part of ^' Faust " went far to reverse 
his criticism : '' A piece of pure nature like an 
apple or an oak, large as morning or night, and 
virtuous as a brier-rose." ^ We quote once more 
from " Thoughts on Modern Literature " : 

" [Goethe] does not say so in syllables, yet a 
sort of conscientious feeling he had to be tip to 
the universe is the best account of many of [his 
stories]. . . . He never stopped at surface, but 
pierced the purpose of a thing and studied to 
reconcile that purpose with his own being. Hence 
a certain greatness encircles every fact he treats ; 

^l"^'' 373- ^iv, 373, from the Journal of 1851. 

3x11,326. -^iv, 277. ^111,242. 

53 



EMERSON 

for him it has a soul, an eternal reason why it was 
so, and not otherwise. This is the secret of that 
deep realism, which went about among all objects 
he beheld, to find the cause why they must be 
what they are. 

<'But also that other vicious subjectiveness, that 
vice of the time, infected him also. We are pro- 
voked wdth his Olympian self-complacency, the 
patronizing air with which he vouchsafes to tol- 
erate the genius and performances of other mor- 
tals. . . . This subtle element of egotism in Goethe 
certainly does not seem to deform his compositions, 
but to low^er the moral influence of the man. . . . 

"We think, when we contemplate the stu- 
pendous glory of the world, that it were life 
enough for one man merely to lift his hands and 
cry with Saint Augustine, ' Wrangle who pleases, 
I will wonder.' ' Well, this he did. Here was a 
man who in the feeling that the thing itself was so 
admirable as to leave all comment behind, went up 
and down, from object to object, lifting the veil 
from every one, and did no more. . . . 

" But now, that we may not seem to dodge the 
question which all men ask, nor pay a great man 
so ill a compliment as to praise him only in the 

^ " He moves our wonder at the mystery of our life." iv, 375 ; 
Journal, 1S31. Cf. Carlyle in " Sartor Resartus," Book I, ch. x. 

54 



GOETHE 

conventional and comparative speech, let us hon- 
estly record our thought upon the total worth and 
influence of his genius. Does he represent, not 
only the achievement of that age in which he 
lived, but that which it would be and now is be- 
coming ? And what shall we think of that absence 
of the moral sentiment, that singular equivalence 
to him of good and evil in action which discredits 
his compositions to the pure ? . . . We can fancy 
him saying to himself : ' There are poets enough 
of the ideal ; let me paint the Actual ! . . . ' 

" Yes, O Goethe, but the ideal is truer than the 
actual. . . . " ^ 

Emerson's admiration of Goethe, then, was 
qualified by a number of considerations, the lead- 
ing objection being ethical. And yet when Rev. 
John Weiss railed against Goethe's morals, Emer- 
son declared him " a worshiper of truth, and a most 
subtle perceiver of truth." . . . ''This clergyman 
should have known that the movement which in 
America created these Unitarian dissenters, of 
which he is one, began in the mind of the great 
man he traduces." - He could not allow another to 
find fault with a man who, whatever his blemishes, 
was yet a great intellectual leader. 

^ " Thoughts on Modem Literature," vol, xii. 
^iv, 371. See also the poem, " To J. W." 

55 



EMERSON 

Clearly, Emerson wished to say the best he 
could of Goethe. And yet, as we have seen, his 
nature was at odds with Goethe's. Carlyle, who 
introduced Goethe to him, was much more a 
debtor to this exponent of modern German 
thought. Goethe's emphasis upon action, for ex- 
ample, corresponds to Carlyle's Gospel of Work. 
The notes in MacMechan's edition of " Sartor 
Resartus " show abundantly the indebtedness of 
Carlyle to Goethe, even to the use of catch-words 
and phrases. One of these, — "half -man," — not 
mentioned by Professor MacMechan, is borrowed 
by *' Sartor" from " Wilhelm Meister." ' Even 
Goethe's fragmentariness, observed by Emerson,^ 
is paralleled in the heterogeneous structure of the 
clothes philosophy. 

On the other hand, Goethe's sentimental and 
romantic spirit are alien to the mature Emerson. 
His concreteness of illustration, the body in which 
he makes tangible his thought, are close to Car- 
lyle's vivid style,3 and far from Emerson's native 
tendency to abstractions. Moreover, in the drama, 

^ " Die Halbmenschen " : " W. Meister's Lehrjahre," Book III, 
ch. xii, paragraph 2. 

2 IV, 286, 287. 

3 See, for example, the architectural details in the Hall of the 
Past, ** Wilhelm Meister," and the poetic prose of Mignon's 
funeral-song. 

56 



GOETHE 

and in Shakespeare as a dramatist, Emerson is a 
novice, Goethe a master. 

Some resemblance, however, may be traced. 
Goethe said : '* In poetry, only the really great and 
pure advances us, and this exists as a second 
nature, either elevating us to itself, or rejecting 
us.' Emerson's dictum that a poem is to be 
judged by the state of mind it induces, as ex- 
pressed in the preface to ** Parnassus," is along the 
same line of thought. In Wilhelm Meister's Third 
Religion, ''that veneration of the contradictory, 
the hated, the avoided," there is a suggestion of 
Emerson's belief that even sin is destined to work 
good. Carlyle expresses this doctrine more ex- 
plicitly in the same book : '' Even on sin and crime 
to look not as hindrances, but to honor and love 
them as furtherances of what is holy."" The 
curious may find also a parallel to the doctrine of 
self-reliance in the follovv^ing : "In each endow- 
ment, and not elsewhere, lies the force which must 
complete it. . . . Let us merely keep a clear and 
steady eye on what is in ourselves." ^ These, 
however, are scattered passages, in the midst of 

^ Quoted by Emerson, viii, 66. 

^"W. Meister, Travels," ch. xi (Carlyle's translation). See 
also the close of ch. x. 

3"W. Meister," viii, ch. v (Carlyle's trans.), vol. ii, p. 155. 

57 



EMERSON 

wide plains of text suggesting the Concord thinker 
not at all, or at a distance of interpretation. 

Emerson and Carlyle were on terms of greater 
intimacy than Emerson and Goethe. Although 
they met only three times, their correspondence 
was abundant, and the regard of one for the other 
never failed. Despite strong divergences in tem- 
perament and upbringing, both hold fast to the 
supreme reality of spiritual things, and to the spir- 
itual side of life. It is not always easy to tell 
which first gave expression to the thoughts that 
they uttered in common, but it is not over-daring 
to say that in fundamentals no two men alive 
in their time were more sympathetic than these. 
Carlyle ventured to criticize a certain pallor in 
Emerson's style, and Emerson never could quite 
approve Carlyle's ideal of hearty laughter ; but these 
were questions of taste or of personal necessity. 

Emerson and Carlyle recognized the universe as 
full of symbols and as itself symbolic ; and both 
had high regard for him who could perceive the 
vital truth beneath its half-concealing, half -revealing 
garment.' Both looked upon history as in the main 
the personality and deeds of individual leaders.^ 

^ See MacMechan's " Sartor Resartus," pp. 201-203 ; cf. Emer- 
son's essay, "The Foet,^' passim. 

^Carlyle's "Essay on Biography,"" Critical and Miscellaneous 
Essays"; " Sartor," p. 161 ; cf. Emerson on History. 

58 



CARLYLE 

Both saw that the author in borrowing may trans- 
form his material, and so be in effect creative.^ 
Both trusted the poet to find his own expression, 
when once insight had enabled him to penetrate 
below the surface of the world ; he need not 
imitate the rhythm-beats of conventional versifica- 
tion ; if only he be himself inspired, his subject 
will find due music.- 

To recall Carlyle's style, and furnish parallels of 
thought, a few further examples are subjoined, in 
his very words. Man influences other men, says 
he, not only by letters and messages, but by *'the 
minutest that he does . . . and the very look of 
his face blesses or curses whom so it lights on, and 
so generates ever new blessings or cursing." This 
suggests Emerson's 

Nor knowest thou what argument 

Thy life to thy neighbor's creed hath lent.3 

Emerson's contemplation of slavery led him back 
to the prevalent inward slavery of the individual. ^ 

^ Carlyle on Voltaire, " Misc. Essays," ii, 57. 

^"Gennan Playwrights," in Carlyle's "Critical and Misc. Es- 
says," Boston, 1858, I, 430; cf. the poem "Merlin," and "The 
Poet," III, 9, ID. 

3 MacMechan's " Sartor," p. 223 ; Emerson's " Each and All." 

'^ See VI, 23 ; also the beginning of the speech of 1854 on " The 
Fugitive Slave Law," vol. xi. 

59 



EMERSON 

Carlyle's expression of another side of the same 
thought is as follows : " Thou who exclaimest over 
the horrors and baseness of the Time . . . think 
of this : over the Time thou hast no power ; to 
redeem a world sunk in dishonesty has not been 
given thee ; solely over one man therein thou hast 
a quite absolute uncontrollable power ; him redeem, 
him make honest ; it will be something, it will be 
much, and thy life and labor not in vain." ' Emer- 
son said : " Beware, when God lets loose a thinker 
upon this planet." Carlyle : ''Truly a Thinking 
Man is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness 
can have ; every time such a one announces him- 
self, I doubt not, there runs a shudder through the 
Nether Empire." " 

Carlyle, in his essay on Diderot, urges the 
thinker (whom he calls also the poet and the seer) 
to write down that which he sees, whether noble 
or commonplace. 3 Emerson, in well-known phrase, 
tells us to speak forth to-day's thought in hard 
words, and to-morrow's, regardless of a low con- 
sistency.-* Once more, Carlyle utters the same 
thought, in ringing tones : 

^ " Corn-Law Rhymes," Essays, III, 295. 

^ MacMechan's " Sartor," p. 108. 

3 Essays, ill, 304. 

'^" Self-Reliance." 

60 



CARLYLE 

" Awake, arise. Speak forth what is in thee : 
what God has given thee, what the Devil shall not 
take away." ' 

To conclude, the sum and substance of the 
current philosophic idealism came to Emerson 
chiefly through Coleridge, Goethe, and Carlyle. 
The earlier idealism of Berkeley had awakened 
youthful response to the life that throbs in a 
universe seemingly dead. In Schelling, Emerson 
found eyes looking upon the world very much as 
his own looked upon it. In Goethe, he saw an- 
other man living out, like himself, his individual 
life. From all, he caught whatever he could 
assimilate, especially the indwelling spirit of God. 

^ MacMechan's " Sartor," p. iSo. 



6i 



IV 

MYSTICISM AND PANTHEISM 



MYSTICISM AND PANTHEISM 

Before approaching those Greek authors that 
Emerson loved so well, orderly procedure suggests 
that attention be paid to two special forms of 
philosophical thought, with each of which at one 
time or another he has been identified. 

Emerson is often called a mystic, and it must be 
acknowledged that there is some degree of justifi- 
cation for the term. If *' the thought that is most 
intensely present with the mystic is that of a 
supreme, all-pervading, and in-dwelling power, in 
whom all things are one," ' this thought is at the 
foundation of Emerson's philosophy. The article 
from which the preceding quotation is taken goes 
on to say that the single principle enunciated is an 
insufficient criterion of mysticism as distinguished 
from the main assumption of all religion. The 
ordinary philosophical definition of mystic is one 
who believes in the possibility of direct personal 
revelation from God to man. Emerson certainly 
so believed, as we soon shall see. The intensity 
of realization of the divine in the individual, or 

^ Encyclopedia Britannica, " Mysticism." 

65 



EMERSON 

from another point of view, the dependence upon 
periods of exaltation, ecstasy, or special revelation 
for a knowledge of truth — these are the more 
exact qualities of differentiation. From this stand- 
point also there is evidence that Emerson was 
essentially a mystic. He too had special seasons 
of spiritual exaltation. " Standing on the bare 
ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and 
uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism 
vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball : I am 
nothing ; I see all ; the currents of Universal 
Being circulate through me ; I am part or parcel 
of God." ' In addition to partaking of the mystic's 
season of special revelation, Emerson's trend agrees 
with what has been pointed out as the theoretic 
drift of mystical states. Professor James, after 
citing striking examples of mystical ecstasy, speaks 
as follows of the philosophical directions of such 
inarticulate states : " One of these directions is 
optimism, and the other is monism. . . . We feel 
them as reconciling, unifying states. They appeal 
to the yes-function more than to the no-function in 
us. ..." "^ One thinks of Emerson's optimism, 
his unfaltering declaration of the eternal One, his 

' I, 10. Cf. the poem " Pan." See also iii, 71, and the Index 
under " Ecstasy." 

^" The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 416, ed. 1902. 

66 



MYSTICISM 

fondness for affirmative statement and for attempts 
to reconcile opposites in a great all-satisfying 
assertion. 

It may be added that there is a likeness between 
the mystical doctrine that God should not be 
prayed to for anything and Emerson's pulpit habit 
of public meditation that so exasperated those 
accustomed to public petition. 

But if Emerson appears mystical in being the 
subject of states of pecuHar exaltation and insight, 
and also in sharing the fundamental philosophical 
content of mysticism, is he to be completely de- 
scribed by this term which has so often been 
used to denominate him — sometimes in reproach ? 
There are at least two respects in which Emerson 
avoids the excesses of historical mysticism : one is 
in his practical common sense, and the other is in 
his virtue. His upbringing in poverty, forcing him 
into hard contact with actual affairs, may have 
had something to do with the former; at any 
rate it is the universal testimony that he was 
a duplex product, uniting spiritual vision with 
ordinary prudence. Lowell's oft-quoted couplet 
will scarcely be bettered : 

''A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range 
Has Olympus for one pole, for t'other the Exchange." ' 

'"A Fable for Critics." 

67 



EMERSON 

Contrast his small valuation of wealth, after the 
mystic's fashion/ with his well known remark to 
Fields the publisher on a second payment of roy- 
alty on a reprinted book. He took the money, 
saying : " I was a thief from the foundation of the 
world." In short, his moments of elevation did 
not, in the days of his maturity, destroy his ability 
to appreciate a fact. Further, the same common 
sense applied to religion made it impossible that 
his conduct should even faintly suggest the vicious 
extremes to which mysticism led in the days of the 
Spanish Inquisition.^ Lasciviousness, charlatanry, 
the doctrine that the sins of the body are not 
chargeable to one of the Illuminated — Emerson's 
name lends no countenance to such folly. His 
compound contained ingredients which kept him 
from permanent detachment from actual affairs on 
the one hand, and on the other hand from sinful 
excesses due to a failure to distinguish between a 
genuine divine revelation and its counterfeit. In 
his own time, the contrast was conspicuous be- 
tween his poised sanity and the eccentricities 
of the unbalanced Transcendentalist.^ Besides, 
Emerson's treatment of well-known mystics in his 

^ II, 123 and Note. 

^ H. C. Lea, " A History of the Spanish Inquisition," ch. v. 

^"Emerson in Concord," pp. 206-211. 

68 



MYSTICISM 

writings is that of one who weighs, appreciates the 
good, and notes limitations. Thus he perceives 
that Jacob Behmen's ' rapture, occasioned by the 
morning sunhght striking upon the polished 
pewter " comes to stand to him for truth and 
faith ; and, he believes, should stand for the same 
realities to every reader. But the first reader 
prefers as naturally the symbol of a mother and 
child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweler 
polishing a gem. Either of these, or a myriad 
more, are equally good to the person to whom 
they are significant. Only they must be held 
lightly . . . " ^ Yet, determined to do him justice, 
he praises Behmen, at the cost of Swedenborg : 
" Behmen is healthily and beautifully wise, not- 
withstanding the mystical narrowness and incom.- 
municableness. Swedenborg is disagreeably wise, 
and with all his accumulated gifts, paralyzes and 
repels." ^ Emerson's *' fatal gift of perception" sees 
the defects of those whom he admires — at no time 
more so than when he discusses mysticism. He 
longs for the master mind who shall by deeper 
principles unite existing contradictions. *' See 
how daring is the reading, the speculation, the 
experimenting of the time. If now some Genius 

^ Or Boehme (1575-1624). ^ iv, 142. 

'ni, 34. 

69 



EMERSON 

shall arise who could unite these scattered rays ! . . . 
Here is a great variety and richness of mysticism, 
each part of which narrowly disgusts whilst it 
forms the sole thought of some poor Perfectionist 
or ' Comer-out,' yet when it shall be taken up as 
the garniture of some profound and all-reconciling 
thinker, will appear the rich and appropriate dec- 
oration of his robes." ' 

Though scattered references to distinguished 
mystics — Tauler, George Fox,^ Behmen, Plotinus 
— are found in Emerson's writings, it was to 
Swedenborg, after all, that he gave fullest cre- 
dence. Emerson prized Swedenborg for his sym- 
boUsm 3 — that view of the world so memorably 
expressed in ''The Poet." From him too may have 
come suggestion of the doctrine of correspondence.-* 
Emerson's first introduction to Swedenborgianism 
may well have been through Sampson Reed's 
''Observations on the Growth of the Mind," 
a little book first published in 1825. Emerson 
sent a copy of this book to Carlyle in May, 1834,5 

'I, 275. 

^ Emerson described himself to Haskins as *' more of a Quaker 
than anything else." T. W. Higginson, "Emerson Centenary," 
p. 60. 

3 IV, 31S, first Note. ^jy, 115, ii6. 

^ Correspondence, i, 17. 

70 



MYSTICISM 

and was pleased with Carlyle's interest in it/ In 
truth there is much in this Uttle treatise which 
would please one of a spiritual turn of mind. 
Gravitation is one expression of God's immanence, 
so that literally we walk with Him. The child 
grows up in his Father's house with a feeling of 
wonder ; but, improperly, this feeling gradually dis- 
appears. (So Carlyle said in " Sartor Resartus.") 
Science, beginning with classification, should never 
lose the sense of miracle. One is reminded of 
*' Nature" by such a passage as this: ''The 
natural world was precisely and perfectly adapted 
to invigorate and strengthen the intellecual and 
moral man. Its first and highest use was not to 
support the vegetables which adorn, or the animals 
which cover, its surface ; nor yet to give suste- 
nance to the human body ; — it has a higher and 
holier object, in the attainment of which these were 
only means. It was intended to draw forth and 
mature the latent energies of the soul." ^ Emer- 
sonian too is the following : " By poetry is meant 
all those illustrations of truth by natural imagery, 
which spring from the fact, that this world is the 

^ Possibly Carlyle got a hint from this book. Its doctrine of 
miracles {Edition of 1838, p. 76) is substantially the same as in 
" Sartor's " chapter on " Natural Supernaturalism," first published 
July, 1834. 

^P. 36, ed. 1838. 

71 



EMERSON 

mirror of Him who made it." ' Again, as if a sen- 
tence from "Self-Reliance": "God is the source 
of all truth. Creation (and what truth does not 
result from creation ? ) is the effect of the Divine 
Love and Wisdom. Simply to will and to think, 
with the Divine Being, result in creating ; in actu- 
ally producing those realities, which form the 
groundwork of the thoughts and affections of 
man." ^ Here follows the teaching of " The 
Sphinx " : " Man alone, of all created things, 
appears on his own account to want the full 
measure of his happiness ; because he alone has 
left the order of his creation." ^ And here is 
the duty to cultivate one's own powers : " Every 
individual also possesses peculiar powers, which 
should be brought to bear on society in the duties 
best fitted to receive them. The highest degree 
of cultivation of which the mind of any one is 
capable, consists in the most perfect development 
of that peculiar organization, which as really exists 
in infancy as in mature years. . . . All adventi- 
tious or assumed importance should be cast off, as 
a filthy garment. . . . There is something which 
every one can do better than any one else. . . . 
Kings will be hurled from their thrones, and 
peasants exalted to the highest stations, by this 

'P. 41, ed. 1838. 3 P. 78. 

^p. 42. 

72 



MYSTICISM 

irresistible tendency of mind to its true level.' . . . 
It becomes us, then, to seek and to cherish this 
pecidium of our own minds, as the patrimony 
which is left us by our Father in heaven. . . . 
Let a man's ambition to be great disappear in a 
willingness to be what he is ; then may he fill a 
high place without pride, or a low one without 
dejection." ^ 

It is hard to say what influence such passages as 
these had upon one who read to discover in his 
author his own ideas. The book met Emerson 
when he was about twenty-two, and consequently 
impressionable. One thing is certain. He did 
not give to Swedenborgianism unqualified assent, 
though he venerated its author. In a letter to 
Carlyle, November, 1834, Emerson says:^ ''Swe- 
denborgianism . . . has many points of attraction 
for you. . . . [Swedenborgians] esteem, in common 
with all the Trismegisti, the natural world as 
strictly the symbol or exponent of the spiritual, 
and part for part ; the animals to be the incarna- 
tions of certain affections ; and scarce a popular 
expression esteemed figurative, but they affirm to 

^ See "The Conservative," i, 317 : " Yonder peasant, who sits 
neglected there in a comer, carries a whole revolution of man 
and nature in his head, which shall be a sacred history' to some 
future ages." 

^ S. Reed, pp. 85-87. ^ Correspondence, pp. 32, t^t^. 

73 



EMERSON 

be the simplest statement of fact. Then is their 
whole theory of social relations — both in and out 
of the body — most philosophical, and, though at 
variance with the popular theology, self-evident. It 
is only when they come to their descriptive theism, 
if I may say so, and then to their drollest heaven, 
and to some autocratic not moral decrees of God, 
that the mythus loses me. In general, too, they 
receive the fable instead of the moral of their 
iEsop.' They are to me, however, deeply interest- 
ing, as a sect which I think must contribute more 
than all the other sects to the new faith which 
must arise out of all." High praise, but accom- 
panied by the discrimination of a thinker who was 
accustomed to pick and choose. 

In some degree, then, Emerson was a mystic.^ 
But his mysticism was compatible with life on a 
high plane of conduct, and was accompanied by a 
constant perception of differing values. Finally, 
his mysticism was less a resort to unhabitual 
moods of illumination than a constant recourse to 

^ " Swedeiiborg and Behmen both failed by attaching them- 
selves to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral senti- 
ment, which carries innumerable Christianities, humanities, divin- 
ities, in its bosom." iv, 135. 

^ In 1853, Emerson told F. B. Sanborn, then a Har\'ard sopho- 
more, that he hoped to see "a good crop of mystics at Harvard." 
•' The Personality of Emerson," p. 8. 

74 



PANTHEISM 

such moods. Those who knew him from day to 
day speak of his shining presence as it walked the 
streets of Concord, engaged it might be in humble 
affairs, as the presence of one who bore about with 
him the atmosphere and radiance of a rare and 
lofty soul. As boy and man, he was singularly 
free from the faults of human kind, and this 
habitual dwelling on the heights gave his face 
the benignity and calm of one who not occasionally 
but always walked in the spirit. 

The other term that has been applied to Emerson 
in a derogatory sense is pantheist. Here again it 
is not difficult to see how the designation arose. 
The pantheist believes that God is everything, and 
everything is God. This is not far from Emerson's 
own belief. But he is evidently not among those 
who name matter as the simple cause of the uni- 
verse, and he thus escapes the lowest form of 
pantheism. It is rather in his dislike to ascribe 
personality to divinity that his opponents have 
found a nail on which to hang their epithet. But 
Emerson's reluctance to regard deity as a person 
comes from his fear lest personality may limit that 
which is by nature infinite.' Because of this very 

^ From the Journal of 1838 and 1835, as quoted in Cabot's 
" Life," pp. 341-343 : " What shall I answer to these friendly 
youths who ask of me an account of theism, and think the views 
I have expressed of the impersonality of God desolating and 

75 



EMERSON 

fear of limitation, leading to mis-worship, does he 
shrink from identifying Christ with God, as we 
have already seen. To him, there is indeed one 
all-embracing entity and cause, but this cause has 
will, which, in its up-streaming, is ever carrying 
the creation into something higher.' It is benefi- 
cent, bringing good out of evil. There is no 
real confusion of the nature of sin and virtue, for 
man is called upon to trust the instinct within him 



ghastly ? I say that I cannot find, when I explore my own con- 
sciousness, any truth in saying that God is a person, but the re- 
verse. I feel that there is some profanation in saying that He is 
personal. To represent Him as an individual is to shut Him out 
of my consciousness. He is then but a great man, such as the 
crowd worships. ... I deny personality to God because it is 
too little, not too much. Life, personal life, is faint and cold to 
the energy of God. For Reason and Love and Beauty, or that 
w^hich is all these, — it is the life of life, the reason of reason, 
the love of love." 

" We cannot say that God is self-conscious or not self-con- 
scious, for the moment we cast our eye on that dread nature it 
soars infinitely out of all definition and dazzles all inquest." 

" The human mind seems a lens formed to concentrate the 
rays of the divine laws to a focus which shall be the personality 
of God. But that focus falls so far into the infinite that the 
form or person of God is not within the ken of the mind. Yet 
must that ever be the effort of a good mind, because the avowal 
of our sincere doubts leaves us in a less favorable mood for 
action ; and the statement of our best thoughts, or those of our 
convictions that make most for theism, induces new courage and 
force." 

' VIII, 4. 

76 



PANTHEISM 

which leads him on his upward way. God may 
see an outcome justifying all the present evil in 
the world, but that vision is no invitation to man 
to commit sin. 

Thus the spirit, as well as the letter, of Emerson's 
teachings, is opposed to those features of panthe- 
ism with which fault is generally found. Hegel, 
Schelling, and Spinoza are leading exponents of 
one or another form of pantheism. Xenophanes 
also, who first brought pantheism into vogue, is 
hailed by Emerson because he found One at the 
base of the universe.' Hegel's view of God as 
coming to himself in the minds of men and as 
having no other existence, is nowhere asserted by 
Emerson. SchelHng's perception of the same life 
running through nature and man is more nearly 
Emerson's view. The relation of Schelling and 
Hegel to Emerson's thought has already been 
touched upon. It remains to consider Spinoza. 

Once Emerson mentions Spinoza by name, in 
generous acknowledgement of stimulus received : 
*' Plotinus too, and Spinoza, and the immortal bards 
of philosophy, — that which they have written out 
with patient courage, makes me bold." ^ The 
temptation to identify the doctrines of Emerson 

^ See infra, ch. vi. 
^1,162. 

77 



EMERSON 

with those of Spinoza is considerable, and in per- 
sonality as well (despite the difference in their 
earthly span of years), there are striking resem- 
blances. Both were *' God-intoxicated " men, un- 
less any term implying temporary loss of sanity is 
inapplicable to Emerson. Both were by tempera- 
ment reserved, and both were separated from the 
church of their up-bringing by opinions adjudged 
heretical. But Emerson had not Spinoza's logical 
faculty, nor was he capable of working out a philo- 
sophical system. By reason of his lecturing and 
otherwise, he was brought into more active rela- 
tions with men than was the expatriated, almost 
solitary maker of lenses, and, like him, Emerson 
kept himself sweet-tempered and spiritual. 

In their thought, too, there is a fundamental 
similarity. *' Besides God, no substance can be nor 
can be conceived." ^ "The human mind is a part 
of the infinite intellect of God." It has "an 
adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite 
essence of God." ^ These propositions, drawn from 
Spinoza, might have been written by Emerson. 
They are the bed-rock of his philosophy. Besides, 
both Spinoza and Emerson believe in the intuitive 

^" Ethic," Part I, prop. xiv. Trans, by W. Hale White, 

N. Y., 1894. 

^ lb., Part II, XI, Cor. ; XLVii. 

78 



PANTHEISM 

perception of truth. Both declare that evil is only 
the privation or negation of good/ In short, it 
almost seems as if the minds of these two thinkers 
were created with the same prepossessions, and 
leapt to the same conclusions. 

One very striking difference is in their method 
of arriving at truth. Spinoza is mathematical 
and scientific. He deduces his results according 
to geometrical formulae. Emerson is the seer. 
Spinoza is interested in current discoveries in 
natural science as a worker in the same field. 
Emerson is almost entirely unscientific in the 
modern sense. Spinoza in his opinions makes no 
room for free will, but regards everything that 
comes to pass as foreordained. Emerson too 
writes of fate at times as if man were ringed 
about with unescapable and even dominating 
necessity, but he summons with clarion call to 
action as well as to resignation. Though contem- 
plative, his Yankee mind has a more practical cast 
than that of the Jewish mystic. On the other 
hand Spinoza, while declaring that the highest 
virtue is to know God, makes much also of love to 
God, and ingeniously treats the feelings of men at 
length in an attempt to deduce them mathemati- 

' Spinoza's Letters to Blyenbergh, numbered xxxii, or xix. 
" De Intellectus Emendatione," etc., trans, by R. H. M. Elwes, 
London, 1898; p. 332. Cf. Emerson, II, 121. 

79 



EMERSON 

cally. Both say that virtue is intrinsically a bless- 
ing.' Spinoza declares explicitly his belief in 
immortality ; ^ Emerson almost assumes immor- 
tality. Spinoza is not so thoroughgoing an optimist, 
for he finds that nature acts in vain, and that God 
has no end in view in his creation of the universe. ^ 
In their primary assumption, however, that of the 
all-inclusiveness of God, they are at one ; and their 
main divergence is in method — the strict forms of 
geometric logic on the one hand ; a simple recep- 
tivity to thought on the other. 

Emerson, we conclude, is a pantheist, as he is a 
mystic, in a quaUfied sense. He is neither, in the 
lower and more scientific forms in which, histori- 
cally, mysticism and pantheism have appeared. He 
is a mystic in that he believes in the contact of God 
with man, and the possibility of consequent direct 
illumination. He is a pantheist in that he finds 
God everywhere. 

' " Ethic," Part V, prop. xlii. 

^ " Ethic," Part V, prop, xxiii. 

^ " Ethic," Part I, Appendix, p. 40 ; " Ethic," preface to Part 
IV, p. 178. 



80 



V 

PLATO 



PLATO 

Emerson gave to Plato a higher praise than he 
accorded to any other exemplar of the intellectual 
Hfe. Here, he said, is the value of many libraries. 
'' Out of Plato come all things that are still written 
and debated among men of thought." ' Again, 
" Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, 
Rousseau, Alfieri, Coleridge," — each "is some 
reader of Plato, translating into the vernacular, 
wittily, his good things." ' The oft-quoted saying 
of Emerson that "Plato is philosophy, and phi- 
losophy, Plato," 3 and another sentence, " Here is 
the germ of that Europe we know so well," "^ are 
brought into the light of a sober statement of 
details by Professor Jowett. " In the ' Republic ' 
is to be found the original of Cicero's ' De Repub- 
lica,' of St. Augustine's 'City of God,' of the 
* Utopia' of Sir Thomas More, and of the nu- 
merous other imaginary States which are framed 
upon the same model. The extent to which 
Aristotle or the Aristotelian school were indebted 

' IV, 39. ^ IV, 40. 

2 IV, 39. ^iv, 45- 

83 



EMERSON 

to him in the * Politics ' has been little recognized, 
and the recognition is the more necessary because 
it is not made by Aristotle himself. ... In Eng- 
lish philosophy, too, many affinities may be traced, 
not only in the works of the Cambridge Platonists, 
but in great original writers like Berkeley or 
Coleridge, to Plato and his ideas. ... Of the 
Greek authors who at the Renaissance brought a 
new life into the world, Plato has had the greatest 
influence. The ' Republic ' of Plato is also the 
first treatise upon education, of which the writings 
of Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul, and 
Goethe are the legitimate descendants. Like 
Dante or Bunyan, he has a revelation of another 
life ; like Bacon, he is profoundly impressed with 
the unity of knowledge ; in the early Church he 
exercised a real influence on theology, and at the 
Revival of Literature on politics. . . . He is the 
father of ideaHsm in philosophy, in politics, in 
literature. And many of the latest conceptions of 
modern thinkers and statesmen, such as the unity 
of knowledge, the reign of law, and the equality 
of the sexes, have been anticipated in a dream by 
him." ' From the time when, as a young Harvard 
student, Emerson gladly read in Ralph Cudworth's 
seventeenth - century theology various illustrative 

^ '* The Dialogues of Plato," vol. in, p. iii. 

84 



PLATO 

quotations from Plato and others/ until in his old 
age he laid down for the last time his own much- 
used translation of the complete Dialogues/ the 
American recognized in the Greek thinker a master 
mind in literature. 

Some people read for ideas. But Emerson, as 
he himself has told us, read for '* lustres," and to 
make his own top spin.^ He delighted to find a 
kindred spirit behind his book. Thus, though the 
Christian centuries rolled between, he hailed in 
Plato a man of temperament like his own. More 
than once the resemblance in personal traits has 
been pointed out. Both were unsystematic, both 
scorned to strive for an obvious consistency of 
thought, both were wide borrowers of the material 
furnished by other writers. As Dr. Holmes po- 
litely said, Emerson holds the mirror up to his 
great men at such an angle as — unintentionally, 
no doubt — to reflect his own face as well as that 

' " The Trae Intellectual System of the Universe," by Ralph 
Cudworth, 1678. A copy of this book is in the libraiy of 
Harvard University. For a statement concerning Emerson's 
first acquaintance with it, see Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson's 
notes to the Centenary' edition of " Representative Men," pp. 
294, 311. 

^ Trans, by Sydenham and Taylor, 5 vols., London, 1804. 

^ Cabot, pp. 289, 291. See also infra, end of ch. vi. 

85 



EMERSON 

of his hero.' Examples of the quaUties common 
to Plato and Emerson are good breeding,^ under- 
statement,3 the search for the fit word/ " His 
patrician polish, his intrinsic elegance, edged by an 
irony so subtle that it stings and paralyzes," — 
these words written of Plato by Emerson s might 
have been written of Emerson himself, though 
jocularity, sarcasm, and persiflage are refined in 
the later writer by the amenities of twenty-three 
hundred civilizing years. Both sought to unite 
the purest ideahsm with a strict knowledge of 
practical affairs,^ and, more important than the 
rest, both sincerely and patiently sought for abso- 
lute truth, and were not to be put off with the 
shine of appearances. 

But this similarity of temperament and method 
led to a similarity of ideas. It is the present 
purpose to show, first, the resemblance between 
the fundamental principles of Plato and those of 
Emerson, and then to descend to certain narrower 
generaUzations of each, pointing out also in the 
process such differences as call for notice. 

' IV, 300. 

2 IV, 310. 

3 IV, 60. Cf. " The Superlative," x, 161. 

^ IV, 59. 

5 IV, 57. 

^ IV, 54, 55. Cf. Dr. Harris's comment, iv, 315. 

86 



PLATO 

The most important part of Plato's work is his 
theory of Ideas. According to this doctrine the 
ever-changing objects and perceptions of the sense 
world are only faint images of eternal realities in 
the permanent world of being. Each external 
thing — nay, each mathematical conception, each 
thought of a thing — has, corresponding to it but 
highly transcending it, an unseen reality, never 
actually quite perceived by man, who, however, 
ascends painfully toward such perception by means 
of the representative objects of the sense world, 
and by means of his own reason and reflection. 
One may thus rise from specific objects to a 
knowledge of general concepts, and from general 
concepts appreciate the reality of these Ideas. 
The objects of sensible experience, and the corre- 
sponding elusive Ideas, are not, said Plato, essen- 
tially alike. Their relation is a relation of purpose. 
That is, the Ideas (which themselves are some- 
times treated by Plato as endowed with the 
life of Divinity) wilfully make themselves known 
to man by means of their pale and shadowy repre- 
sentations in the world of nature.' Resting in 
the symbols of things, mankind is involved in 

' This statement agrees with Plato's later rather than with his 
earlier philosophy. But Professor Paul Shorey (Chicago " De- 
cennial Publications ") argues that there is no essential difference 
between Plato's earlier and his later teaching. 

87 



EMERSON 

the emptiness and fickleness of the shifting world 
where everything Becomes, and nothing Is. Pen- 
etrating below the surface, by means of the Dia- 
lectic method prescribed by Plato, man may reach 
glimpses of absolute Being. 

Modern interpreters of Plato declare that his 
Ideas, as he conceived them, were not in the least 
spiritual, but were objective in character. It is 
sufficient for our present purpose to note that 
readers following Plato were unable to conceive 
the Ideas as objective, and thus that Plato be- 
came, as Jowett says above, the father of modern 
ideahsm. 

Now it needs very little insight in order to per- 
ceive a striking resemblance between the funda- 
mental principles of Plato and those of Emerson. 
Of course Emerson does not accept the doctrine 
of Ideas in its Platonic form. But he too was 
always acting as if the sense world were but the 
cloak of an eternal reality.' He too was always 
striving to pierce through the symbols of the 
temporal that he might abide in the eternal. To 
Emerson — as may perhaps be read most conveni- 

' " It were too much to say that the Platonic world I might 
have learned to treat as cloud-land had I not known Alcott, who 
is a native of that country ; yet I will say that he makes it as 
solid as Massachusetts to me." Emerson's Journal, 1852, quoted 
by Cabot, p. 280. 

88 



PLATO 

ently in the essay called "The Poet" — the things 
of nature body forth eternal verities, which it is 
the business of the poet to see and to translate 
into language that all men may understand. " We 
are symbols and inhabit symbols. . . . The poet, 
by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a 
power which makes their old use forgotten, and 
puts eyes and a tongue into every dumb and in- 
animate object." ' A tolerably clear exposition of 
this doctrine is to be found in the essay on ''The 
Method of Nature " : " In the divine order, in- 
tellect is primary ; nature, secondary ; it is the 
memory of the mind. That which once existed in 
intellect as pure law, has now taken body in nature. 
It existed already in the mind in solution ; now it 
has been precipitated, and the bright sediment is 
the world. . . . We may therefore safely study the 
mind in nature, because we cannot steadily gaze 
on it in mind ; as we explore the face of the sun 
in a pool, when our eyes cannot brook his direct 
splendors." ^ 

Before leaving the first phase of the doctrine of 
Ideas, let me quote from Walter Pater's elucidation 

' III, 20. See also on " Poetry and Imagination," in vol. viii. 
W^indelband's exposition of Plato (p. 194) speaks of this process 
as the "synoptic intuition of reality presented in single exam- 
ples " (Cushman's translation of " Windelband's History of An- 
cient Philosophy"). 

2 I, 197. 

89 



EMERSON 

of Plato a few sentences describing this doctrine. 
Observe if, terms being changed, the language of 
the quotation would not describe the fundamental 
thought of Emerson as well. 

'♦ With Plato [the Ideas] are the creators of 
our reason — those treasures of experience, stacked 
and stored, which, to each one of us, come as by 
inheritance, or with no proportionate effort on our 
part, to direct, to enlarge and rationalize, from the 
first use of language by us, our manner of taking 
things. They are themselves . . . the proper ob- 
jects of all true knowledge, and a passage from all 
merely relative experience to the ' absolute.' In 
proportion as they lend themselves to the individ- 
ual, in his effort to think, they create reason in 
him ; they reproduce the eternal reason for him." ' 

Emerson's version of such teaching is in sen- 
tences like this: *'A11 the parts and forms of 
Nature are the expression or production of divine 
faculties, and the same are in us." ^ Or, again : 
" We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which 
makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its 
activity. When we discern justice, when we dis- 
cern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow 
a passage to its beams." ^ 

^" Plato and Platonism," N. Y., 1891, pp. 149, 150. 

2 VIII, 43. 

3 II, 64. 

90 



PLATO 

The correspondence between the views of Plato 
and those of Emerson is no less evident when the 
central doctrine of Ideas is carried out into its 
more specifically ethical and theological applica- 
tion. Plato, in the sixth book of the ' Republic,' 
uses the sun as an image by which is figured the 
highest good.' Just as the sun makes it possible 
to see what would otherwise be invisible or obscure, 
so does the Idea of Good make knowledge possi- 
ble to man. As the sun gives fruitfulness to the 
earth, without being itself that fecundity, so the Idea 
of Good enters into and makes possible the being 
and essence of all things that are known. The Idea 
of Good conditions knowledge, but is higher than 
knowledge. It transcends beauty, but is behind 
all manifestations of beauty. In short, the Idea 
of Good is the most comprehensive and exalted of 
all Ideas, uniting the disjunctive Ideas of Knowl- 
edge and Beauty. Sometimes, as we have already 
said, Plato seems to give it the attribute of person- 
ality, and to make it nearly equivalent to God. 

Thus in the celebrated cave figure in the seventh 
book of the *' Republic " he says : " My opinion is 
that in the world of knowledge the idea of good 
appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort ; 
and, when seen, is inferred to be the universal 

^ Jowett's " Dialogues," vol. iii, p. 209. 
91 



EMERSON 

author of all things beautiful and right, parent of 
light and of the lord of light in this visible world, 
and the immediate source of reason and truth in 
the intellectual." ' At other times he withdraws 
God to an infinite distance from His works. ''But 
the father and maker of all this universe is past 
finding out ; and even if we found him, to tell of 
him to all men would be impossible." ^ 

In much the same way, Emerson finds that 
virtue is the only thing of intrinsic value. In his 
essay on Compensation he shows that the lot of 
one man is about equal to that of any other man. 
The gain of some new and super-added power, as 
that of quick transportation, means the loss in de- 
gree of some more primitive power, as the power 
to walk. We have watches, but we have forgotten 
how to tell time by the sun. Even calamities have 
their beneficent side. All is in equipoise, except 
virtue. That is an intrinsic benefit, having no 
counterweight. To be moral, to be spiritual, is to 
possess the one reality, knowing no discount. In 
the words of another lecture : " That which is sig- 
nified by the words * moral ' and * spiritual ' is a 
lasting essence, and, with whatever illusions we 
have loaded them, will certainly bring back the 

^ Jowett's translation, p. 217. 

^ " Timaeus," p. 449, Jowett's trans. 

92 



PLATO 

words, age after age, to their ancient meaning. I 
know no words that mean so much. In our defini- 
tions we grope after the spiritual by describing it 
as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is real. 
. . . Men talk of <mere morality' — which is much 
as if one should say, ' Poor God, with nobody to 
help Him.' " ' Again, with reference to the phases 
of nature : " The ends of all are moral." ^ 

Both Plato and Emerson, then, are enamored 
of the Good. And it may be added that both are 
interested in the first place in goodness as an 
abstract thing. The translation of goodness into 
righteous acts is assumed by both, rather than 
especially emphasized. See things right, they 
both say, and as a matter of course you will do 
right. 

Something of the same resemblance, but not in 
so great degree of approach, is seen when we com- 
pare Plato's provision of a world-soul with Emer- 
son's assumption of an eternal being that inhabits 
ail things. In the "Timaeus," Plato gives a fanci- 
ful account of the creation, according to which the 
eternal God mixed what is called the Same with 
what is called the Other. These names correspond 
on the one hand to what is indivisible and un- 
changeable, and on the other to the divisible and 

M'l, 214, 215. 

^VIII, 5. 

93 



EMERSON 

material. From this mixture, Being is formed 
(ovaia), or Essence, out of which, together with the 
preceding two, the world-soul is created. The body 
of the universe is afterward made from the four 
elements, — earth, air, fire, water. In dealing with 
such recalcitrant material as the Other, the God of 
Plato finds himself hemmed in by a degree of 
Necessity, resident in the nature of the substance 
used. But when, by certain bendings and cuttings, 
he has formed the firmanent of the fixed stars and 
the orbits of the seven planets, he has likewise 
prepared a guiding principle of life and motion, 
which will determine the relations of stars and 
planets, as well as address the mind of man. This 
principle, with its mathematical correlatives, comes 
pretty close to what nowadays we should call 
natural law, though Plato could not quite anticipate 
the objective view of modern science.' After the 
creator has instituted his ordinances, he leaves 
inferior deities to carry them out, and himself 
remains withdrawn. This is so because Plato felt 
the inconsistency of having an omnipotent God 
present in an imperfect universe. 

^ Professor J. M. Manly calls attention to the relations of 
Plato's Same and Other with that view of modern scientific 
speculation, according to which an atom of any one chemical 
element differs from an atom of another element not in its 
fundamental nature but in the number and motion of the ions 
involved. 

94 



PLATO 

Of course this world-soul suggests the Over Soul 
of Emerson. But there are marked differences. 
Emerson's Over Soul is supreme. There are no 
exceptions to its laws — no necessity hampers its 
perfect freedom. It is the source and law-giver of 
all things. Its purposes are entirely beneficent, 
and will be justified in the final result. It is true, 
as has already appeared, that Emerson sometimes 
denies personality to his conception of God. Yet 
his God is not less than a person, but more.' 
Emerson's God, besides, is more than a method : 
He is a ruling power, never withdrawn. Plato and 
Emerson agree, then, in a conception of God which 
makes Him intimately related to the universe. 
But Emerson's God is immanent, "closer than 
breathing, and nearer than hands and feet," un- 
escapable, severe, yet benign. It is hardly neces- 
sary to emphasize the fact that Emerson in no wise 
follows Plato's fantastic mathematical details. 

Hitherto we have tried to compare Plato and 
Emerson with regard to the fundamentals of their 
philosophy. Let us now point out resemblances 
between them concerning a few minor doctrines, 
which yet are related to the major. Emerson, we 
have seen, is primarily a lover of virtue. More- 
over, he would have men derive their virtue from 

^ Cabot, pp. 341, 499. 

95 



EMERSON 

within, rather than follow the shifting standards of 
the crowd, ''the yoke of custom and convention." ' 
All readers of " Self Reliance " know his manly 
war against conformity and convention. Like 
Socrates in Plato, he would lead his hearers away 
from the discussion of the separate virtues, and 
toward a realization of the nature of virtue."" Says 
Emerson : " There are two confessionals, in one or 
the other of which we must be shriven. You may 
fulfil your round of duties by clearing yourself in 
the direct^ or the reflex way. Consider whether 
you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, 
cousin, town, cat and dog — whether any of these 
can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex 
standard and absolve me to myself. I have my 
own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the 
name of duty to many offices that are called duties. 
But if I can discharge its debts it enables me to 
dispense with the popular code. If any one imag- 
ines that this law is lax, let him keep its com- 
mandment one day." ^ Plato makes a similar 
comparison between the virtue of opinion and the 
virtue of knowledge. One may be right, the other 
must be right. In a discussion of the Pythagorean 

' Jowett, I : " Phasdrus," p. 473. 

^ " Meno " : Jowett, ii, pp. 27-63. 

'11,74. 

96 



PLATO 

doctrine of the transmigration of souls, a good 
degree of happiness is granted to him who has 
practiced the civil and social virtues ; but he is 
debarred from rising to the company of the gods, 
where only the votaries of philosophy — those who 
act on principle — may enter. 

" The happiest, both in themselves and the place 
to which they go," . . . says Socrates, . . . " are 
those who have practiced the civil and social 
virtues which are called temperance and justice, 
and are acquired by habit and attention without 
philosophy and mind." 

" Why are they happiest .? [asks Cebes] ..." 

" Because they may be expected to pass into 
some gentle and social kind which is like their own, 
such as bees or wasps or ants, or back again into 
the form of man, and just and moderate men may 
be supposed to spring from them. . . . No one 
who has not studied philosophy and who is not 
entirely pure at the time of his departure is allowed 
to enter the company of the gods, but the lover of 
knowledge only." ' 

A similar comparison is made in the tenth book 
of the " RepubUc," in the story of Er, who, slain in 
battle, came to Ufe again, and told what he saw 
in the other world. Lachesis, the daughter of 

^ Jowett, II, " Phasdo," p. 225. 

97 



EMERSON 

Necessity, gave all departed spirits the choice of 
lots determining another earthly life. One chose 
the lot of the tyrant, and found too late that his 
choice was lamentable. He blamed the gods, and 
chance — everything but himself. For he was 
one of those who " in a former life had dwelt in a 
well-ordered State, but his virtue was a matter of 
habit only, and he had no philosophy." ' Thus we 
see that both Plato and Emerson would have men 
act not from conformity but from principle. 

Again, Plato and Emerson are alike in that both 
are optimists. *' If the world be indeed fair," says 
the "Timaeus,"^ '*and the artificer good, it is 
manifest that he must have looked to that which is 
eternal ; but if what cannot be said without blas- 
phemy is true, then to the created pattern. Every 
one will see that he must have looked to the 
eternal ; for the world is the fairest of creations 
and he is the best of causes." But this perfect 
creator had to work with imperfect material. 
There is an element of necessity in connection 
with matter, which even the creator could not over- 
come. ^ The universe is then only a partial copy 
of the divine Ideas. In short, the creation is not 

^ Jowett, III, 336, " Republic," x. 

^ Jowett, III, 449. 

3 Jowett, III, 391 ; cf. "Timasus," Jowett, iii, 453, 462. 



PLATO 

strictly in every respect best, but only best under 
existing circumstances. Emerson's optimism is 
more thoroughgoing. He was not blind to the 
slow progress of mankind. '' If any man consider 
the present aspects of what is called by distinction 
society^ he will see the need of these ethics. The 
sinew and heart of a man seem to be drawn out, 
and we are become timorous, desponding whim- 
perers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, 
afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age 
yields no great and perfect persons." ' But still 
the balance is on the right side. " Gentlemen," 
he said in 1844, "there is a sublime and friendly 
Destiny by which the human race is guided, . . . 
Men are narrow and selfish, but the Genius or 
Destiny is not narrow, but beneficent. . . . Only 
what is inevitable interests us, and it turns out 
that love and good are inevitable, and in the course 
of things. That Genius has infused itself into 
nature. It indicates itself by a small excess of 
good, a small balance in brute facts always favor- 
able to the side of reason." ^ Such is Emerson's 
characteristic note. He is impatient of pessimism. 
" A Schopenhauer, with logic and learning and 
wit, teaching pessimism, — teaching that this is 

^11, 75. C£. VIII, 179, quoted atite, ch. I. 
'1,372. 

99 



EMERSON 

the worst of all possible worlds, and inferring that 
sleep is better than waking, and death than sleep, 
— all the talent in the world cannot save him from 
being odious. But if instead of these negatives 
you give me affirmatives ; if you tell me that 
there is always life for the living ; that what man 
has done man can do ; that this world belongs 
to the energetic ; that there is always a way to 
everything desirable ; that every man is provided, 
in the new bias of his faculty, with a key to 
Nature, and that man only rightly knows himself 
as far as he has experimented upon things, — I am 
invigorated, put into genial and working temper ; 
the horizon opens, and we are full of good will and 
gratitude to the Cause of causes." ' Sometimes 
this mood refuses to take no for an answer from 
the universe or any part of it, and, as we have seen, 
we find Emerson beholding a botanical abortion as 
having to the intellect attained its normal com- 
pleteness,^ or we see him unaghast even before the 
presence of sin, which he feels must be virtue in 
the making, or at worst the absence of virtue.^ 
Carlyle, whose temper was of another flavor, chafed 
under Emerson's optimism. As has often been 
told, he took him perforce one day into the slums 

^ VIII, 138. 3Sgg ch. I. 

2 VIII, 158. 

100 



PLATO 

of a great city, face to face with vice and squalor. 
But the optimist looked at it all, and reaffirmed 
his optimism. 

Such optimism is possible when one firmly be- 
lieves in love as an ultimate fact in the universe. 
Both Plato and Emerson show man ascending 
through the stages of physical love to the contem- 
plation of an ideal beauty and goodness that inhabit 
all things. It is not too much to say that Emer- 
son's essay on Love, apart from the several explicit 
references to Plato, follows closely the line of 
thought laid down in the '' Symposium." ' Per- 
haps the best way to make this clear is to quote a 
somewhat extended passage from Plato's dialogue, 
and subjoin a quotation or two from Emerson. 
There are those, says Plato, whose love leads 
them to the procreation of offspring. There are 
others — poets, artists, statesmen — who find their 
souls unsatisfied until they have begotten immortal 
children in the form of poems, statues, institutions. 
One kind of desire may pass into the other. A 
lover of one beautiful form will come to perceive 
the beauty in all forms. '' And when he perceives 
this he will abate his violent love of the one, which 
he will despise and deem a small thing, and will 
become a lover of all beautiful forms ; in the next 

^11, i8i, 1S3. Cf. his poem on " Initial, Dsemonic, and Ce- 
lestial Love." 

lOI 



EMERSON 

stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind 
is more honorable than the beauty of the outward 
form. So that if a virtuous soul have but little 
comeliness, he will be content to love and tend 
him, and will search out and bring to the birth 
thoughts w^iich may improve the young, until he 
is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of 
institutions and laws, and to understand that the 
beauty of them all is of one family, and that per- 
sonal beauty is a trifle ; and after laws and institu- 
tions he will go to the sciences, that he may see 
their beauty, being not like a servant in love with 
the beauty of one youth or man or institution, him- 
self a slave mean and narrow-minded, but drawing 
towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, 
he will create many fair and noble thoughts and 
notions in boundless love of wisdom ; until on that 
shore he grows and waxes strong, and at last the 
vision is revealed to him of a single science, which 
is the science of beauty everywhere." ^ 

In like manner, Emerson, in the second sentence 
of his essay on Love, summarizes the course of 
love from the particular to the general : " Nature, 
uncontainable, flowing, forelooking, in the first sen- 
timent of kindness anticipates already a benevo- 
lence which shall lose all particular regards in 

^" Symposium," Jowett, i, pp. 580-581. 
102 



PLATO 

its general light." ' Throughout the essay the 
thought is along Platonic lines. We quote two 
representative passages : '' If," says Emerson, 
"accepting the hint of these visions and sugges- 
tions which beauty makes to his mind, the soul 
passes through the body and falls to admire 
strokes of character, and the lovers contemplate 
one another in their discourses and their actions, 
then they pass to the true palace of beauty, more 
and more inflam.e their love of it, and by this love 
extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts 
out fire by shining on the hearth, they become 
pure and hallowed. By conversation with that 
which is in itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, 
and just, the lover comes to a warmer love of 
these nobilities, and a quicker apprehension of 
them. Then he passes from loving them in one 
to loving them in all, and so is the one beautiful 
soul only the door through which he enters to the 
society of all true and pure souls. . . . And be- 
holding in many souls the traits of the divine 
beauty, and separating in each soul that which is 
divine from the taint which it has contracted in 
the world, the lover ascends by steps on this ladder 
of created souls." ^ Once more : '' Thus are we put 
in training for a love which knows not sex, nor 

^11, 170. 
2 II, 182, 183. 

10^ 



EMERSON 

person, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and 
wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing 
virtue and wisdom." ' 

It is clear that Emerson's view of love rises to 
a more altruistic and more spiritual quality — is 
not so entirely so self-cultural as Plato's. It is 
also clear that the development of thought in the 
two cases is along the same lines. Sometimes 
the resemblance extends to individual sentences. 
Plato's " Consider, too, how great is the encour- 
agement which all the world gives to the lover," 
becomes Emerson's more succinct and telling 
'' All mankind love a lover." ^ 

But Emerson is by no means a slavish fol- 
lower of Plato. He naturally abandons many 
details, such as the four-fold division of the virtues. 
He hopes for immortality, over against Plato's 
absolute belief in an after-existence. Plato would 
educate by means of music and gymnastics : ^ 
Emerson had small taste for either. More deeply, 

^ II, i88. 

-Jowett, I, 552. Cf. Emerson, 11, 172. For another passage 
somewhat resembling Plato, read the last paragraph of " Illu- 
sions," in " Conduct of Life," and place beside it the correspond- 
ing passage, quoted by Dr. Emerson in the note to the Centenary 
edition. 

3"Timsus," 88; "Republic," II, 376, III, 410: Jowett, iii, pp. 
511, 59,98. 

104 



PLATO 

Plato accepted slavery as a permanent institution : 
he could see nothing better on his horizon. Emer- 
son, once drawn into the abolitionist controversy, 
remained a consistent and eloquent opponent of 
ownership in man. Plato's ideal republic was, 
after all, an aristocracy : never to be broken down 
or questioned. Emerson, while recognizing the 
value of good birth and good upbringing, meas- 
ured the difference between Greece and America 
by holding open the opportunity for the rise of the 
exceptional man. In line with his aristocratic ten- 
dencies, Plato would keep the taint of manual labor 
from the two directing classes of his ideal State, 
for " all manual work necessarily lowers the soul to 
the sensuous, and makes distant its supersensible 
goal." ' But Emerson argues for the benefit of 
manual labor for all classes, especially for those who 
have forgotten in their dependence for practical 
matters upon others how to use their own hands. ^ 
Perhaps the most striking difference between the 
two thinkers is that the ethics of Plato is primarily 
social, that of Emerson primarily for the individual. 
Sweep the road before your own door, says the 
latter to every citizen, — so shall all the road be 
swept clean. Order your own life aright ; free 

' Windelband, p. 215. 
^1,235-238. 

105 



EMERSON 

yourself from slavery ; so shall all be well ordered, 
and all slavery abolished. On the other hand, 
Plato is commonly regarded as having proposed an 
organization of society in which the State provides 
for the best growth of the individual, who other- 
wise could not reach such growth. This is in 
accord with the cosmocentric character of Greek 
philosophy, as far as possible removed from the 
modern fashion of beginning with the ego, as the 
one thing certain. It is true that Plato is some- 
times beheved to have had the individual primarily 
in mind, and to have framed the State for his 
benefit. Professor Maguire says that the virtues 
of Plato are essentially non-social.' But at any 
rate it is certain that the republic sketched by 
Plato was no such State as Emerson's philosophy 
would lead to. Mr. George Willis Cooke, in a 
pubhc address (Boston, 1903), charged Emerson 
with failing to grasp the needs of society as such ; 
with wanting a proper conception of society as an 
organism. To this critic Emerson's individualism 
is unqualified. It is at least evident that the 
method of approach to the perfect society made by 
Plato is entirely different from that made by Emer- 
son. If every man should do his own duty well, 
as Emerson would have him, a better community 

'"Essays on the Platonic Ethics," pp. 5, n. Thos. Maguire, 
Dublin, 1870. 

106 



PLATO 

might in time arise than Plato ever dreamed, 
though by a different birth. 

We have seen, by means of a somewhat detailed 
comparison, that Emerson was profoundly influ- 
enced by the writings of the chief disciple of 
Socrates. He read him assiduously, and did not 
hesitate to use what congenial matter he found. 
We have also seen that he preserved his own point 
of view. But the sympathy between the Greek 
and the American philosopher is obvious, and ex- 
tends far below the surface. In their essential 
assumptions, and in the famifications of their 
thought, the two men show surprising similarity. 



07 



VI 

HERACLEITUS, ARISTOTLE, 
THE NEO-PLATONISTS 



HERACLEITUS, ARISTOTLE, THE 
NEO-PLATONISTS 

While there is no doubt that Plato was to Emer- 
son the eminent figure of antiquity, there are nu- 
merous references, sometimes casual, to other phi- 
losophers of the older world. Prominent among 
the thinkers from whom Emerson hked to quote 
were Heracleitus, whose iravTa pel has become 
proverbial ; Aristotle, the follower and in a sense 
the opposer of Platonism ; and that group of later 
Greeks whose thought, following Plato's, at first 
ran parallel to Christianity, and later tried unsuc- 
cessfully to absorb the new rehgion. 

Emerson liked to quote from Heracleitus the 
formula ascribed to him to illustrate the flux of 
the universe.' But the attempt of the Greek to 
find unity amid the obvious diversity was what had 
affinity for the Concord writer's habitual attitude- 
" The early Greek philosophers, Heracleitus and 
Xenophanes," ^ he says, "measured their forces on 
this problem of identity." ^ Further, he recognized 

^ VIII, 200, and Note. Cf. 214. 

^ See the poem, " Xenophanes," ix, 137. 

^vi, 324, and Note. Cf. x, 97. 

I I I 



EMERSON 

the strife of opposites, which Heracleitus would 
reconcile into harmony/ but he quotes "War is 
the Father of all things " in the literal sense of war, 
for a purely literary purpose, at the after-dinner 
speech made at Harvard to welcome back the sur- 
viving soldiers of 1865.^ Among the Heracleitean 
fragments one finds Emersonian sayings, as : " Good 
and ill are the same," " Man's character is his 
fate"; 3 though the great majority of references 
to the Greek in Emerson are, as so often, merely 
illustrative in character. 

The most interesting point in connection with 
Heracleitus is suggested by Dr. Edward Waldo 
Emerson, who says that the perception of Heraclei- 
tus that the world is constantly changing suggested 
new values to his father, who saw in it *' evolution, 
a doctrine by no means unanimously admitted in 
the year of Darwin's * Origin of Species,' when the 
lecture was written." ^ Quotations are given from 
"Woodnotes," including: 

I, that to-day am a pine, 
Yesterday was a bundle of grass. 5 

^ See the fragments 45, 46, 47, 62, in J. Burnet's " Early Greek 
Philosophy," London, 1892, p. 137. 

'^xi, 341. ^viii, 402. 

3 Fragments 57, 121, in Burnet. ^ ix, 58. 

112 



HERACLEITUS 

More specific is the oft-quoted verse introductory 
to " Nature," prefixed in 1849 : 

. . . Striving to be man, the worm 
Mounts through all the spires of form. 

The whole matter of Emerson's apprehension of 
the doctrine of evolution, and how he came to en- 
tertain it by contact with Leibnitz, Oken, Lamarck, 
and other precursors of Darwin, is told in the 
" Biographical Sketch " prefixed to the first volume 
of the Centenary edition. 

Other anticipations by Emerson, if so much 
digression may be allowed, are suggestions of the 
self-help of modern charities, Garner's conversation 
of animals, realism in literature, and Christian 
Science. In all these cases, as in the case of evo- 
lution, the doctrine is not worked out into its full 
scientific form, but is hinted at, foreseen, as by 
a prophet-seer. These anticipations are contained 
in the following : 

" It is a low benefit to give me something ; it is 
a high benefit to enable me to do somewhat of 
myself." ' 

^ I, 133. A parallel passage occurs in vii, 115: "To give 
money to a sufferer is only a come-off. . . . We owe to man 
higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man man. If he 
is sick, is unable, is mean-spirited and odious, it is because there 



EMERSON 

'' We should go to the ornithologist with a new 
feeling if he could teach us what the social birds 
say when they sit in the autumn council, talking 
together in the trees." ' 

'' The scholar will feel that the richest romance, 
the noblest fiction that was ever woven, the heart 
and soul of beauty, lies enclosed in human life." ^ 

''The order or proceeding of nature was from 
the mind to the body, and, though a sound body 
cannot restore an unsound mind, yet a good soul 
can, by its virtue, render the body the best 
possible. 3 

Emerson might have gained his conception of 
the evolutionary process at work in nature from 
Aristotle. Aristotle's philosophical principle was 
that nature strives upward from the very first 
signs of life, which signs can be seen even in 
inorganic processes, and that the striving is ex- 
is so much of his nature which is unlawfully withholden from 
him. He should be visited in this his prison with rebuke to the 
evil demons, with manly encouragement, with no mean-spirited 
offer of condolence because you have not money, or mean offer 
of money as the utmost benefit, but by your heroism, your purity, 
and your faith. You are to bring with you that spirit which is 
understanding, health, and self-help." 

'vi, 281. 

^i, 177. 

3 IV, 84. This doctrine is ascribed to Plato. 

114 



ARISTOTLE 

pressed in an unbroken series from the lowest 
kinds of spontaneous creations to the highest form 
of terrestrial life which is manifested in man.' But 
Aristotle's method, though praised,^ is out of har- 
mony with Emerson's approach to life. To begin 
with individuals, and, having carefully observed 
them, find expressed in them whatever general ideas 
may be there, is nearer the method of modern empiri- 
cal science than that custom of Emerson's of Vv^atch- 
ing his own mind to detect among the thoughts 
that crossed it those that seemed worthiest of 
expression. So far as Aristotle reaches the idea 
of God, or makes a memorable definition by the 
use of a concrete image,^ or appeals from the indi- 
vidual to pure reason,^ Emerson can find material 
in him. Ancient observations on nature and man, 
well worded, may furnish illustration ; but the 
temper of Aristotle to lean away from Plato's 
Ideas and toward the details of the tangible world 
is common to Emerson only so far as the latter's 
practical sense was not submerged in the loftier 
waves of inspiration. It may be added that the 

' Cushman's translation of " Windelband's History of Ancient 
Philosophy," p. 275. N. Y., 1SS9. 

^iv, 104. 

3 1, 55; 111,30. 

4 VII, 39; XII, 62. 

115 



EMERSON 

distinctive doctrines of Aristotle, such as that of 
the determining Form, and the Golden Mean, find 
no conspicuous place in Emerson's writings. 

As to Neo-Platonism, read in large part in the 
translations of Thomas Taylor, if one may judge 
from the explicit references to Plotinus, Jamblicus, 
Proclus, and others, these authors were interesting 
to Emerson less as the successive representatives 
of the stages through which the newer Greek 
thought had passed, than as writers who furnished 
intellectual stimulus and quotable passages. The 
favorite thought in which Plotinus figures is his 
shame for his body. This thought occurs at least 
four times in the works of Emerson/ Proclus is 
twice mentioned as the man who found in the 
visible universe the means of bodying forth intel- 
lectual splendors.^ Jamblicus was religious enough 
to occasion an expectation that he would promote 
a revival in the churches.^ Of these, and other Neo- 
Platonists, as Synesius,^ Emerson speaks in terms 
natural to one who read them not for philosophical 
subtleties, but for their consistent reassertion of 
spirit. His debt to them is best expressed, after 
all, in his own words : 

^i, 58; II, 252; X, 2S1, 461. 
^iii, 14, 31. See also vii, 408. 
^v, 361 ; VII, 40S. 
'♦vii, 202. 

116 



NEO-PLATONISTS 

'' I read Proclus, and sometimes Plato, as I 
might read a dictionary, for a mechanical help to 
the fancy and the imagination. I read for the 
lustres, as if one should use a fine picture in a 
chromatic experiment, for its rich colors. 'T is 
not Proclus, but a piece of nature and fate that I 
explore. It is a greater joy to see the author's 
author than himself. . . . " ' 

" The imaginative scholar will find few stimulants 
to his brain like these writers." ^ 

" I think the Platonists may be read for sen- 
tences, though the reader fails to grasp the argu- 
ment of the paragraph or chapter. He may yet 
obtain gleams and glimpses of a more excellent 
illumination from their genius, outvaluing the most 
distinct information he owes to other books. For 
I hold that the grandeur of the impression that the 
stars and heavenly bodies make on us, is surely 
more valuable than our exact perception of a tub 
or a table on the ground." ^ 

'111,233. 
^vii, 203. 
3 VII, 409. 



117 



VII 

THE HINDU PHILOSOPHY 



THE HINDU PHILOSOPHY 

Scarcely less influential than Plato upon Emer- 
son's mental development were the poetry and 
philosophy of the Orient. The great works of 
India take precedence in importance over those of 
China and Persia. We will therefore consider first 
the Hindu philosophy. 

Emerson's acquaintance with the poetry of India 
began very early. A letter from Dr. Edward 
Waldo Emerson says : '' I think that I remember 
dimly that even while in college his letters show 
that he had at least read extracts from them [the 
East Indian scriptures], probably in some English- 
man's account of India." He had just turned his 
nineteenth birthday when he copied into his 
Journal the following lines from Sir William 
Jones's translation of verses on "Narayena," or 
Vishnu : 

"... Of dew-spangled leaves and blossoms bright 

Hence ! vanish from my sight, 

Delusive pictures ! unsubstantial shews ! 

My soul absorbed, one only Being knows. 

Of all perceptions, one abundant source. 

Hence every object, every moment flows, 

121 



EMERSON 

Suns hence derive their force, 

Hence planets learn their course ; 

But suns and fading worlds I view no more, 

God only I perceive, God only I adore ! " ' 

This extract suggests comparison with Emerson's 
own exquisite poem, called '' Pan." A printed note 
in the collected Works shows that this interest 
persisted into Emerson's manhood. " Some notes 
in his journals at about the time of his parting with 
his church [1832] show that he already was inter- 
ested in the idealism of the Mahabharata, but 
probably only from extracts which he read in 
De Gerando's ' Histoire comparee des systemes de 
philosophie.' " "" By 1840 he was praising the Vedas 
in a letter to a friend as the '< bible of the tropics 
which I find I come back upon every three or four 
years," and which " contains every religious senti- 
ment, all the grand ethics which visit in turn each 
noble and poetic mind." 3 Between 1842 and 1844 
he had published in T/ie Dial extracts from the 
Vishnu Sarma and The Laws of Manu, besides 
examples of Chinese and Persian religious lore. 
In June, 1843, ^^ wrote to Miss Elizabeth Hoar: 
"The only other event is the arrival in Concord 

^Journals, vol. I, p. 157. 
2 VIII, 413. 

3 IV, 314. Quoted from " Letters of Emerson to a Friend," 
edited by Charles Eliot Norton. Boston, 1899, p. 27. 

122 



HINDU PHILOSOPHY 

of the Bhagavat Gita, the much renowned book 
of Buddhism, extracts from which I have often 
admired, but never before held the book in my 
hands." ' In a lecture given at Tufts College 
Mr. Charles Malloy once told that Emerson lent 
him the Bhagavat Gita for a month, and that 
on reading the book he found in it the whole of 
Emerson's philosophy. The fact is that the cen- 
tral doctrine of the Hindu philosophy — the one- 
ness of all things with the supreme Spirit — struck 
an answering chord in Emerson's breast. It is 
idle to speculate just how far his original tendency 
to find God everywhere was supported or strength- 
ened by the frequent iteration in the Hindu scrip- 
tures of the eternal reality under the mask of 
illusion. Certain it is that this doctrine always 
found Emerson in a receptive mood. His most 
widely known expression of this view is probably 
the oft-cited poem, " Brahma " : 

If the red slayer think he slays 

Or if the slain think he is slain, 
They know not well the subtle ways 

I keep, and pass, and turn again. 

Far or forgot to me is near ; 

Shadow and sunlight are the same ; 

^ Quoted in Dr. Emerson's letter, but I think it is to be found 
elsewhere. 

123 



EMERSON 

The vanished gods to me appear ; 
And one to me are shame and fame. 

They reckon ill who leave me out ; 

When me they fly, I am the wings ; 
I am the doubter and the doubt, 

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings. 

The strong gods pine for my abode, 
And pine in vain the sacred Seven ; 

But thou, meek lover of the good ! 

Find me and turn thy back on heaven. 

The ascription of this poem, in its title and 
phrasing, to the Bhagavat Gita as its main 
source, has already been made by Dr. W. T. 
Harris.' It is indubitable that a fundamental 
assumption of the *' Divine Song" is that man and 
his works, even the objects of his worship, are 
identical in essence with the highest god, who is 
the same as other existing things, while transcend- 
ing them.^ If Mr. Malloy overstated the case, it 

^ See the striking parallels quoted in ix, 465, and in " Emer- 
son's Orientalism," pp. 373-378, " On the Genius and Character 
of Emerson," edited by F. B. Sanborn, Boston, 18S5. In the 
same book (p. ^^y) Protap Chunder Mozoomdar says, in giving 
an East Indian's estimate of Emerson : " He seems to some of 
us to have been a geographical mistake. He ought to have been 
bom in India. . . . All our ancient religion is the utterance of 
the Infinite through Nature's symbolism." 

'^Additional parallels to "Brahma" follow: The first stanza 

124 



HINDU PHILOSOPHY 

is still true that there is fundamental harmony 
between Emerson and the ** Divine Song." For 
example : " To him who sees me in everything, 
and everything in me, I am never lost, and he is 
not lost to me." ' Quotations from other books of 
the East Indian scriptures will illustrate how 
deeply this central idea permeates the Hindu 
philosophy. The following passage from The 
Laws of Manu is to be found reprinted in The 

is closely paralleled in the Katha Upanishad, I Adhyaya, 2d 
Valli, 19 (Max Miiller's trans., in " Sacred Books of the East") : 
" If the killer thinks that he kills, if the killed thinks that he is 
killed, they do not understand; for the one does not kill, nor 
is that one killed." Cited by Hopkins, "Religions of India," 
Boston, 1898, 238 (n.), and by Telang, 45 (n.). "One to me 
are shame and fame," the last line of the second stanza, is sug- 
gested by the god's praise of his obedient worshiper. " He . . . 
to whom praise and blame are alike " (ch. xii, 19). The thought 
of the third stanza is illustrated in Bh. G. (Telang), ch. iv, 29, 
and V, 19. "Brahma[n] is the oblation; with Brahman (as a sac- 
rificial instrument) it is offered up : Brahman is in the fire : and 
by Brahman it is thrown : and Brahman, too, is the goal to which 
he proceeds who meditates on Brahman in the actions." " The 
wise look upon a Brahmin possessed of learning and humility, 
on a cow, an elephant, a dog, and a svapaka [a very low caste], 
as alike." Finally, the last line, " Find me, and turn thy back 
on heaven," is suggested by Bh. G. (Telang), ch. viii, 16: "The 
high-souled ones . . . attaining to me, do not again come to 
life . . . ," for it is to be remembered that Nirvana was regarded 
as superior to the highest heaven. See, for another interpreta- 
tion, IX, 466. 

^ Bh. G. (Telang), vi, 29. 

125 



EMERSON 

Dial: ' " The divine spirit is the whole assemblage 
of gods ; all worlds are seated in the divine spirit ; 
and the divine spirit, no doubt, produces the con- 
nected series of acts performed by embodied souls." 
Again : " The world was produced from Vishnu : 
it exists in him : he is the cause of its continuance 
and cessation : he is the world." ^ Take, as a 
third and last example, a translation by Monier 
Williams, of a part of the Isa Upanishad : ^ 

" Whate'er exists within this universe 
Is all to be regarded as enveloped 
By the Great Lord, as if wrapped in a vesture. 
There is one only Being who exists 
Unmoved, yet moving swifter than the mind ; 
Who far outsteps the senses, though as gods 
They strive to reach him ; who himself at rest 
Transcends the fleetest flight of other beings ; 
Who, like the air, supports all vital action. 
He moves, yet moves not ; he is far, yet near ; 
He is within this universe. Whoe'er beholds 
All living creatures as in him, and him -— 
The universal Spirit — as in all, 
Henceforth regards no creature with contempt." ^ 

Wol. HI, p. 339. 

2 Vishnu Purana, Book I, ch. i. H. H. Wilson's trans., Wil- 
son's Works, VI, p. xi (1864), 

3 "Hinduism," in "Non-Christian Religious Systems," London, 
1901, p. 45. 

'' Proof that Emerson was acquainted with the Vishnu Pu- 

126 



HINDU PHILOSOPHY 

Emerson's view of nature, as a symbol or mani- 
festation of deity, is, by corollary, not far removed 
from that of Brahminism. "There are two beings 
in the world, the destructible and the indestruct- 
ible [explained by Telang as the whole collection 
of things as they appear, with their material cause]. 
. . . But the Being Supreme is yet another, called 
the highest self, who as the inexhaustible lord, per- 
vading the three worlds, supports them." ' Some- 
times the form of expression coincides more nearly. 
'' I [the Deity] am the taste in water, I am the 
light of the sun and moon . . . sound in space . . . 
fragrant smell in the earth, refulgence in the fire : 
I am life in all beings. . . . "^ Compare "The 
Sphinx," the next to the last stanza, in which the 
" all in each " takes similar expression : 

. . . She melted into purple cloud, 
She silvered in the moon ; 

rana and the Upanishads may be found in his essay on " Books," 
where he classes these among the "bibles of the world." vii, 
218. He quotes from the legend of the divinely - protected 
Prahlada in his essay on "Character," x, 120, A striking 
prose passage, quoting from and paraphrasing the Hindu scrip- 
tures, after the fashion of '• Brahma," is in the first lecture 
on Plato, IV, 49-50 : " The same, the same ; friend and foe are 
of one stuff," etc. 

^ Bh. G. (Telang), ch. xv, 18. 

^Bh. G. (Telang), ch. vii, 6-9. 

127 



EMERSON 

She spired into a yellow flame ; 

She flowered in blossoms red ; 
She flowed into a foaming wave ; 

She stood Monadnoc's head. 

As we have seen/ the doctrine of self-reliance 
finds its warrant in the discovery of God in the 
human soul. This doctrine is expressed quite 
explicitly in the Hindu scriptures, in both its 
exhortation to spiritual non-conformity (independ- 
ence), and its assertion of the indwelling Divinity 
as the foundation of such independence. Thus, 
a quotation from The Laws of Manu, printed in 
The Dial^^ says : " All that depends on another 
gives pain ; all that depends on himself gives 
pleasure : let him know this to be in a few words 
the definition of pleasure and pain." Again, "The 
duties of a man's own particular calling,^ although 
not free from faults, are far preferable to the duty 
of another, let it be ever so well pursued. A man 
by following the duties which are appointed by his 
birth, doeth no wrong. A man's own calling, with 
all its faults, ought not to be forsaken." ^ *'The 
devotee whose happiness is within (himself), whose 
recreation is within (himself), and whose light (of 

^ Ch. I. 3 Strictly, caste. 

^iii, 36. *Bh. G. (Telang), ch. xviii, 51. 

128 



HINDU PHILOSOPHY 

knowledge) also is within (himself), becoming 
(one with) Brahma, obtains the Brahmic bliss." ' 
As to the ground of self-confidence, see two 
passages from Indian scriptures in TJie Dial: 
*'The soul is its own witness; the soul itself 
is its own refuge; offend not thy conscious 
soul, the supreme internal witness of men." " O 
friend to virtue, that supreme spirit, which thou 
believest one and the same with thyself, resides 
in thy bosom perpetually, and is an all-knowing 
inspector of thy goodness or of thy wickedness." 
Again, say The Laws : " He who thus recog- 
nizes the Self through the Self in all created 
beings, becomes equal (minded) towards all, and 
enters the highest state, Brahma."^ The Bhaga- 
vat Gita utters this note also : " Having learnt that 
[knowledge], O Son of Pandu ! you will not again 
fall thus into delusion ; and by means of it, you will 
see all beings, without exception, first in yourself, 
and then in me." ^ Other examples might be 
given. 4 

Thus it appears that the diffusion of the 
almighty Spirit through all created things, in- 

^Bh. G. (Telang),ch. v, 4. 
^ Laws of Manu, by C. Biihler, xii, 125. 
3Bh. G. (Telang), ch. iv, 35. 
"••Telang, iii, 35 ff. ; viii, 92. 

129 



EMERSON 

eluding what is commonly called nature and also 
the mind of man, was recognized by the East 
Indian sages — mixed, it is true, with much irrele- 
vant and gross matter — centuries before the birth 
of both Plato and Emerson. 

A more difficult problem is the attempt to iden- 
tify Emerson's doctrine of compensation with the 
Hindu belief in the inevitable fruitage of every 
act. The opening sentence of the essay on Com- 
pensation shows that the writer had cherished this 
subject ever since he was a boy. At nineteen 
he was having "first thoughts on morals and the 
beautiful laws of compensation and of individual 
genius." ' Again, as late as 1840, he writes of the 
Vedas : " It is of no use to put away the book : 
if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon 
the pond, nature makes a Brahmin of me pres- 
ently ; eternal necessity, eternal compensation, un- 
fathomable power, unbroken silence, — this is her 
creed." ^ There is in this last passage a recogni- 
tion of the doctrine of compensation in Brahmin- 
ism, and also an ascription of deeper power to 

' Cabot's " Life," p. 70. 

^iv, 315. From "Letters of Emerson to a Friend," p. 27. Cf. 
the last two lines of the quotation from Beaumont and Fletcher, 
prefixed to " Self-Reliance " : 

" Our acts our angels are, or good or ill. 
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still." 

130 



HINDU PHILOSOPHY 

nature herself. If the idea of universal compensa- 
tion had occurred to Emerson before he met the 
Indian philosophy, at least he found some new ex- 
pression of it there. The truth seems to be that 
Emerson gives a much wider application to the 
doctrine than is to be found in East Indian liter- 
ature. The Hindu believed that a soul's present 
condition, whether inhabiting the body of an animal 
or of a man of a certain caste, was determined by 
his deeds in a former state of existence. Every 
deed thus bore its fruit, for good or evil. For 
example : " Fate is nothing but the deeds com- 
mitted in a former state of existence." ' Another 
passage from The Hitopades says the same thing : 
** Whatsoever cometh to pass, either good or 
evil, is the consequence of a man's own actions, 
and descendeth from the power of the Supreme 
Ruler." ^ Once more : " An act, (whether its) 
origin (be) in the mind, the voice, or the body, 
has (its) fruit, pure or impure ; the courses of 
men, (whether) high, low, (or) medium, (are) born 
of (their) acts." ^ While the Hindu, then, confined 

^ Quoted in The Dial, ill, Z^ ; also in " Fate," Cent, ed., vi, 12, 
with " prior " for " former." From The Hitopades. 

'^ The Dial, in, 82 = Hitop., p. 25. 

3 Burnell-Hopkins, xii, 3. Biihler, for " courses," has " (various) 
conditions." Other examples are Mahabharata, xii, 12453 and 
12456; xiii, 13486. See also Laws of Manu, iv, 240, quoted 



EMERSON 

his view of mortal destiny to a payment by divine 
power for the deeds of a former stage of being, 
Emerson saw the law of payment exemplified in all 
sorts of human circumstance.' But it must not be 
forgotten that to Emerson *' all things are moral." ^ 
His constant effort is to get beneath the superficial 
view of destiny and to see causes at work, which 
at length are to be carried up to the one divine 
cause of all human conditions. There is therefore 
not so large a difference between his view of the 
compensations of nature and those founded upon 
the Nemesis in man's life, as at first appears ; 
though it is clear he has added many illustrations 
in realms apparently outside the realm of ethics. 
Perhaps the dualism of the Persians called his 
attention to such "polarity" as exists in night and 
day ; but we may be sure his mind could not rest 
content until, like the Hindu, he saw that the two 
poles were but extremities of the same body. The 
essence of both the earlier and the later view is 
well expressed in the last half-dozen lines of his 
poem, '< Compensation " : 

in The Dial, III, -^y] : " Single is each man born ; single he dies ; 
single he receives the reward of his good, and single the punish- 
ment of his evil deeds." 

' See " Compensation," /^jj-/z^z. 

'^U, 102. 

132 



HINDU PHILOSOPHY 

Hast not thy share ? On winged feet, 
Lo ! it rushes thee to meet ; 
And all that nature made thy own, 
Floating in air or pent in stone. 
Will rive the hills and swim the sea. 
And, like thy shadow, follow thee. ' 

If we ask concerning the adaptability of Emer- 
son's temperament to Brahminism, we see at once 
that his meditative and detached attitude toward 
truth is in almost precise accord with the Hindu 
spirit. With the Bhagavat Gita, Emerson be- 
lieved action to be preferable to inaction,- but he 
recognized that his own gift was contemplative 
rather than executive. He belonged to the priestly, 
not the warrior caste. The fifth chapter of the 
Bhagavat Gita says in effect that the main thing, 
after all, is a serene and happy spirit. Some con- 
tact with external realities is implied in the very 
act of lixing, but it is in a suitable adjustment 
between itself and the eternal spirit that the ego 
gains its goal. " A man is said to be confirmed 
in wisdom when he forsaketh every desire which 
entereth into his heart, and of himself is happy, 

^We shall not detract from Emerson's originality in noting 
that Ali, son-in-law of Mahomet, once spoke this sentiment (ix, 
495), nor that John Burroughs has expanded it into a well-known 
poem, beginning, " Serene I fold my hands and wait." 

2 Bh. G., iii, 8. 



EMERSON 

and contented in himself. His mind is undisturbed 
in adversity, he is happy and contented in pros- 
perity, and he is a stranger to anxiety, fear, and 
anger. . . . The wisdom of that man is estabUshed, 
who in all things is without affection ; and having 
received good or evil, neither rejoice th at the one, 
nor is cast down by the other." ' Is not this 
unimpassioned attitude the attitude of Emerson 
toward life ? He is not greatly disturbed by the 
presence of sin in the world, nor does he give to 
the highest incarnation of virtue more reverence 
than to one of the many manifestations of deity. 
It is said that one of the greatest obstacles to 
Christian missionary effort in India is that the 
worshiper of Vishnu will accept Christ but as one 
of the numerous incarnations of his own god. 

We may trace, not too curiously, the resem- 
blance between Emerson's ideal of conduct and 
that of the Hindu in other directions. The 
habitual serenity of Emerson led him to speak 
and write of what was agreeable. While it can- 
not be said that he failed on occasion to fit 
strong words to bad things, it was his habit to 
select and to express the pleasant. So is the 
Brahmin exhorted to do. " (What is) well, let 

''Bhagavat Gita, trans, by Charles Wilkins : Bombay, 1887. 
Lecture ii, 55-57. See also iii, 19. 



HINDU PHILOSOPHY 

him call well,' or let him say * Well' only ; ^ let 
him not engage in a useless enmity or dispute with 
anybody." It would seem possible to sketch the 
personal character of Emerson in phrases drawn 
from the Hindu scriptures. Here is a general 
description, fitting the traits of Emerson in almost 
every phrase : " The man who is born with Divine 
destiny is endowed with the following qualities : 
exemption from fear, a purity of heart, a constant 
attention to the discipline of his understanding ; 
charity, self - restraint, religion, study, penance, 
rectitude, freedom from doing wrong, veracity, 
freedom from anger ; resignation, temperance, free- 
dom from slander ; universal compassion, exemption 
from the desire for slaughter ; mildness, modesty, 
discretion, dignity, patience, fortitude, chastity, 
unrevengefulness, and a freedom from vain -glory." ^ 
In short, the aim for a right personal adjustment 
leads to similar results in both cases, because the 
point of view is so nearly identical. 

^ " Let him say, ' Well and good ' " : The Dial, ill, 336. 

"^ " Even if things go wrong " : Biihler, et aL Laws of Manu, 
iv, 139. The preceding quotation in The Dial (in, 336) is of 
similar import : " Let him say what is true, but let him say what 
is pleasing; let him speak no disagreeable truth, nor let him 
speak agreeable falsehood : this is a primeval rule." See also 
Laws of Manu, ii, 161. 

^Bhagavat Gita, C, Wilkins, xvi, i, 2, 3. 



EMERSON 

And so the parallelism might be pressed even 
to phrases, words, and accidental resemblances of 
all sorts. But the recurrence of Emerson to the 
Hindu scriptures is sufficiently attested by his 
verbal quotations from them in his Works, and by 
his frequent mention of them in letters and con- 
versation. While it is probable that an inquiry of 
this sort tends to over-emphasize purely fortuitous 
parallels, there can be no reasonable doubt that 
between the mind of this author and the bibles 
of the East, there existed a fundamental affinity, 
rendering the assimilation of material remarkably 
easy. 

It remains to point out some of the differences 
between the religion of India, in its broad outlines, 
and the intellectual creed of this sturdy-minded 
child of the nineteenth century. He was not a 
servile absorbent of what he read, even here, but 
like the humble-bee of his poem, sipped the sweet 
and the nourishing and let the refuse go. All the 
licentiousness of the Hindu scriptures is lost on 
Emerson. All the details of ceremonial ' find no 
echoing response. The Laws of Manu are almost 
entirely devoted to a recital of particular duties 



^As (Laws of Manu, V, ^^^ 35) relating to the eating of meat 
and the slaying of deer; (viii) dealing with a variety of cases 
before the King or a learned Brahmin. 



136 



HINDU PHILOSOPHY 

under particular circumstances. The quotations 
which The Dial makes from these laws are so 
largely concerned with the expression of general 
or suggestive truths that the great proportionate 
amount of detail in the code as a whole is obscured. 
In its prescribed punishments for specific offenses, 
the code resembles the lex talionis of the Hebrews. 
Throughout these Laws, and elsewhere in the 
Hindu scriptures, appears the assumption of the in- 
feriority of woman, and her proper confinement to 
a domestic sphere. It is needless to point out that 
Emerson's view of woman's place and power is 
exalted.' The Hitopades is really a collection 
of fables, with morals of a prudential character. 
A few of these, such as the tortoise who opened 
his mouth to speak while being carried across the 
country by two geese ; the ass in a tiger's skin ; 
the Brahmin who in a day-dream hurled his stick 
at the dish which was the foundation of his for- 
tunes, are familiar in .^sop or the Arabian Nights. 
The most of them, and their lesson, Emerson 
passes over in silence. The doctrine of transmigra- 
tion of souls, assumed throughout the Bhagavat 
Gita, met its modern counterpart and supplement 
in the doctrine of evolution. A freedom from 
earthly birth is the ideal state of Brahmin and 

^ III, 150, 151. 

137 



EMERSON 

Buddhist. But Emerson is always singing the 
praises of to-day. In short, as he wrote, " Nothing 
is easier than to separate what must have been the 
primeval inspiration from the endless ceremonial 
nonsense which caricatures and contradicts it 
through every chapter " ; ' and it is precisely this 
separation which our author has accomplished, with 
an instinct of marvelous accuracy for the permanent 
amid the transient. 

'IV, 315- 



138 



VIII 

CONFUCIUS, ZOROASTER, 
PERSIAN POETRY 



CONFUCIUS, ZOROASTER, PERSIAN 
POETRY 

<* Nature creates in the East the uncontrollable 
yearning to escape from limitation into the vast 
and boundless, to use a freedom of fancy which 
plays with all works of Nature, great or minute, 
galaxy or grain of dust, as toys and words of the 
mind ; inculcates a beatitude to be found in escape 
from all organization and all personality, and makes 
ecstasy an institution." These sentences, prefixed 
in the Centenary edition to the speech delivered, 
i860, in Boston, in honor of the Chinese embassy, 
doubtless come near to expressing the fundamental 
attraction which all Eastern thought had for Emer- 
son. The Hindus he places if anything a little 
higher than the Persians,' but he found in the 
Oriental temperament as a whole that seizure upon 
the central unity to the comparative neglect of 
details which corresponded to his own habits of 
thought. 

Dr. Emerson tells us how his father became 
acquainted with the Eastern oracles and poetry.'' 



^viii, 239. 
^viii, 413 £f. 



141 



EMERSON 

In Thomas Taylor's translations of Proclus he 
found the Chaldean Oracles attributed to Zoro- 
aster, from which, by the way, he most fre- 
quently quotes in his works rather than from other 
Zoroastrian works.' Besides, he owned a rare 
book, the Desatir, or " Regulations," containing 
sayings of fifteen Persian prophets.^ The full 
title is " The Desatir, or Sacred Writings of the 
Ancient Persian Prophets, together with the 
Ancient Persian Version and Commentary of the 
Fifth Sasan, carefully pubUshed by Mulla Firuz 
Bin Kaus," Bombay, 1 818.3 In his essay on 
" Persian Poetry " he gives prominent place to the 
German versions of Persian belles-lettres made 
by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, and it was these 
German translations, as Dr. Emerson says, that 
formed the basis of Emerson's own re-translations 
and of his knowledge of the chief Persian poets. 
Comments on Hafiz appear in Emerson's Journal 
as early as 1841, and his interpretative poem, 
** Saadi," was printed in The Dial for October, 
1842. Extracts from Confucius appear in The 
Dial for April, 1843. 

^ See the Emerson Index, under Proclus ; and quotations from 
Taylor in The Dial, vol. iv, p. 529 ff. 

^ See quotations in The Dial, vol. IV, p. 59. 

3 III, 314. 

142 



CONFUCIUS 

No doubt, speaking generally, Emerson liked 
Confucius, Zoroaster, Hafiz, Saadi, and the rest, 
because they were all in some true sense heroic 
men; besides, they furnished him quotable ma- 
terial. But we should strive to be more particular 
in stating his affinities with each. 

Of Confucius he cited, in the address in honor 
of the Chinese embassy, his intellectual modesty, 
his so-called "Golden Rule," his emphasis upon 
the doctrine of self-responsibility. He did not 
refer to certain other points of contact, such as the 
satisfaction of Confucius in the poverty of his 
youth because it had taught him many arts ; and 
such sayings as the following : "The superior man 
may have to endure want, but he is still the 
superior man. The small man in the same circum- 
stances loses his self-command." Again, Confucius 
says with Emerson : " Man is greater than any 
system of thought." A favorite quotation from 
Confucius is that in which the governor who com- 
plained of thieves was assured that his own cov- 
etousness was the cause of covetousness in others. 
Both Confucius and Emerson sought to produce 
righteousness in the individual ; both trusted in 
the contagion of personal righteousness. But Con- 
fucius believed that the self needed to be con- 
quered : Emerson that the native instincts needed 
rather to be liberated. Both saw virtue as its own 

143 



EMERSON 

reward, but Confucius found his living embodi- 
ments of virtue in the past, Emerson in the present 
and future. 

As to Zoroaster, his duaUsm is in sharp contrast 
with Emerson's monism. The Eastern prophet 
presupposed the preexistence of evil as a power 
strenuously opposed to good, yet saw, far-off, the 
ultimate triumph of the good. Emerson assumed 
the positive and all-embracing nature of the good, 
now and always. Zoroaster, in a fixed scheme of 
rewards and punishments, figured man's lot after 
death as the nicely-balanced consequence of his 
virtuous and his evil deeds upon the earth. Emer- 
son said little of the life after death, but was 
assured that the good man has absolute good, now 
and here. 

Turning to Persian poets, we remark that, 
although Emerson translates bits from others,' he 
regards seven as the "masters of the Persian Par- 
nassus," "" and of these gives the places of promi- 
nence to Hafiz and Saadi. Firdusi, "the Persian 

^ As Ali Ben Abu Taleb, Adsched of Meru, Ibn Jemin, Feisi, 
Ferideddin Attar, Kermani, Omar, Hilalil (vi, 273 ; viii, 244, 
263 ; IX, 298, 301, 303). See also the Song of Seyd Nimetollah 
of Kuhistan (ix, 304). 

^viii, 237. Six of these seven (all but Enweri, that is, An- 
wari) are translated in specimens by S. Robinson: "Persian 
Poetry for English Readers, Printed for Private Circulation," 
1883. 

144 



PERSIAN POETRY 

Homer," ' has furnished legends and characters, 
but him Emerson does not translate, nor does he 
refer to Firdusi's *<Rustum and Sohrab," which 
Matthew Arnold poetized with memorable classi- 
cism. Of Enweri, distinguished for his Quasidas, 
or purpose-poems, two short translations appear in 
Emerson's verse, and two quotations in the essay 
on *' Persian Poetry," the former two being pan- 
egyrics upon the Shah. Jami and Nisami are each 
quoted once, the former on friendship, the latter 
in an interesting "debate" between the nightingale 
and the falcon. Jelaleddin is mentioned in " Frag- 
ments on The Poet " ^ as he whose 

. . . idle catches told the laws 
Holding Nature to her cause, 

and a dozen lines including these two are prefixed 
to the essay on " Persian Poetry." But these 
specifications seem to have grown out of nothing 
more definite than the particular impression which 
Emerson felt on a given day and before a given 
passage. Of Hafiz and Saadi, however, his ideas 
were more often entertained. Their place with 
him was secure. 

Hafiz was prized as a man who out of the ele- 
ments of life, mean to others, extracted joy, and as 

^ VIII, 241. 2 IX, 325. 

145 



EMERSON 

one who gave his experience full expression.' Both 
he and Emerson reveled in to-day. Emerson 
praises in Hafiz that hardihood and self-equality 
which, resulting from a consciousness that the 
spirit within him is as good as the spirit of the 
world, entitles him to speak with authority; and 
the intellectual liberty which enables him to com- 
municate to others his complete emancipation — 
in short, self-reliance and self-expression.- The 
Persian poet was so far removed in time and place 
that the Puritan critic felt no responsibility for the 
failure of Hafiz to discriminate the exaltation of 
love and wine from that of spiritual insight. 
Emerson, while recognizing this confusion of 
values, goes far to extenuate the fault by suggest- 
ing that love and wine in Hafiz are not always to 
be taken literally, but sometimes emblematically. 
One may believe, however, that love and wine are 
often to be literally understood, and at the same 
time perceive that Emerson has skimmed the 
cream of the Persian poet — has taken him at his 
best. " It is the spirit in which the song is written 
that imports, and not the topics." ^ In " Bacchus," 
Emerson has spiritualized, once for all, the wine of 
Hafiz ; and throughout his treatment of him, the 

' VIII, 420. 3 VIII, 249. 

2 VIII, 247, 249. 

146 



PERSIAN POETRY 

indwelling impulse is recognized as purifying the 
outward form. So we find Emerson quoting with 
satisfaction the saying of Hafiz that the lover is 
nearer spiritual renunciation than the sanctimoni- 
ous monk.' Far apart as the New Englander and 
the Persian were in the details of practical experi- 
ence, they join in the determination to see life each 
for himself, and to express boldly what each finds 
life to contain. 

The space given to comment on Hafiz and to 
quotations from him is greater than to any other 
Persian poet.^ Among the quotations are the fol- 
lowing : " Here is the sum : that, when one door 
opens, another shuts," in which, not obscurely, is 
illustrated the doctrine of compensation. Again, 
compensation appears in this saying : ** Treasures 
we find in a ruined house." 

" Alas ! till now I had not known 
My guide and Fortune's guide are one," 3 

expresses the dependence of every secondary object 
upon the eternal Cause. Further, Emerson's em- 

' VIII, 248. 

^viii, 244-261; IX, 296, 299, 303. The note, ix, 499, states 
that in his first volume of poems Emerson included two long 
translations of Hafiz, now omitted, from the German of Von 
Hammer-Purgstall. 

3 VIII, 245, 246. 



EMERSON 

phasis upon the cheerful side of fate was pretty 
clearly either suggested or confirmed by this 
Persian. Says Hafiz : '• 'T is written on the gate 
of Heaven, ' Woe unto him who suffers himself to 
be betrayed by Fate.' " ' Compare Emerson's 
stimulating affirmation: '*'Tis the best use of 
Fate to teach a fatal courage. ... If you believe 
in Fate to your harm, believe in it at least to your 
good." ^ Add the quatrain in translation from Ali 
Ben Alu Taleb : 3 

On two days it steads not to run from thy grave, 
The appointed and the unappointed day ; 

On the first, neither balm nor physician can save, 
Nor thee, on the second, the Universe slay. 

The essay on ** Persian Poetry " was written 
after 1865, for in that year Emerson, at the re- 
quest of James T. Fields the publisher, had printed 
a paper on Saadi, prefixed to Francis Gladwin's 
translation of the Gulistan, and for that reason 
did not consider Saadi in the essay. Besides, 
Saadi's " Rose-Garden " is mainly a prose work, 
and so in part out of place in an essay on poetry. 
To Emerson Saadi was the ideal poet, and as such 

^ VI, 29 ; also, in rhyme, viii, 245. 
2 VI, 24. 
3 IX, 302. 

148 



PERSIAN POETRY 

he described him in the poem in The Dial of 
October, 1842. In the next year he wrote in his 
Journal, congratulating himself that the personality 
of the author of the Gulistan corresponded so 
closely to the portrait previously drawn of him.' 
Emerson appears to have found in the mystico- 
practical Saadi a congenial spirit. *'The traces of 
[mysticism] in Saadi's writings are neither few nor 
uncertain ; but in the main it may be said without 
hesitation that worldly wisdom rather than mysti- 
cism is his chief characteristic," "" says an authority 
on Persian literature. In Emerson also is the un- 
usual concurrence of ecstasy and prudence. 

An examination of the Gulistan or " Rose- 
Garden," which Emerson names as among the best 
" Table-Talks," 3 shows the combination of shrewd- 
ness and ethical penetration that Emerson loved 
and manifested. Prudence, patience, a sustaining 
of the social relations with a kindness that does 
not obliterate self-interest, — these are some of the 
virtues that Saadi illustrates in his numerous anec- 
dotes. Emerson must furthermore have been 
attracted by the felicities of expression that come 
out even in the English translation, and by the wit 

' VIII, 414 ; IX, 129 ff, 320 ff. 

^" A Literary History of Persia." E. G. Browne, N. Y., 1906. 
P. 526. 

3 VII, 208. 

149 



EMERSON 

and vividness that cannot be wholly buried in a 
new speech. The height of passion displayed is 
Oriental, and non- Emersonian, but doubtless for 
that very reason was treasured by one who was 
constantly appreciating what he did not pretend to 
rival. Content with the day's gifts was taught in 
Saadi's story (a favorite with Emerson) of the one 
day when he complained that he had no shoes, only 
to meet in the great mosque a man who had no 
feet. The first tale in the fifth book deals with a 
youth loved by the sultan whom no one else found 
beautiful, and suggests Emerson's quotation : 

What care I how fair she be, 
If she be not fair to me ? 

And the laborer who preferred to eat the bread of 
his own labor ' rather than be under obligations to 
the hospitable Hatim Tai is a strong example of 
self-reliance. 

In summary, let us say that Emerson, besides 
illustrations of his fundamental doctrines of self- 
reliance and compensation, and of less-reiterated 
views as to fate, found in these Eastern thinkers 
and sayers a felicity of expression which charmed 
him into quotation ; and also here and there a 
glimpse of that heroism of spirit and utterance 

^"Gulistan," iii, 15. 

150 



PERSIAN POETRY 

that never failed to take him captive. More 
inclusive than all the rest, he found here **that 
for which mainly books exist . . . the adding of 
knowledge to our own stock by the record of new 
facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions which 
distribute facts, and are the formulas which super- 
sede all histories." ' Like himself, the best minds 
of the Orient were seers. 

^viii, 237. 



151 



IX 

MONTAIGNE 



MONTAIGNE 

Finally, a brief comparison is made of Emerson 
and Montaigne. 

Montaigne is one of the few authors with whom 
Emerson identifies himself. '* It seemed to me as 
if I had myself written the book, in some former 
life," ' is a familiar tribute. As his son has 
shown,^ Emerson admired Montaigne's wit and 
courage, and shared his love of truth and candor, 
of nature and retirement, of Plutarch and Plato. 
<' For these [essays of mine] are my own particular 
opinions and fancies, and I deliver them for no 
other but only what I myself believe, and not what 
others are to believe, neither have I any other end 
in this writing but only to discover myself, who 
shall, peradventure, be another thing to-morrow, if 
I chance to meet any book or friend to convince 
me in the meantime." ^ Who says this — Mon- 
taigne, or Emerson ? The letters and the extract 

^iv, 162. 

'IV, 335-336. 

^Essays, i, 25 : Hazlitt's translation, p. 86. 



EMERSON 

from the Journal which Dr. Emerson quotes,' 
prove that his father appreciated the closeness to 
reality of the " Essais," while repelled by their 
"semi-savage indecency." The audacity of the 
Frenchman doubtless stimulated to plain speech 
the Puritan's refinement. But there came a time 
when Emerson reacted from his early admiration, - 
and even named Montaigne among the books not 
to be read. 3 

In truth there is hardly greater contrast any- 
where than between these two, the one a citizen of 
the world, at different times a practicing lawyer 
and the mayor of Bordeaux, a defender of custom 
except in literary composition,^ and in personal 
character — partaking of his age — on the level of 
sensual pleasures though not swamped by them ; 
the other through life a " scholar," an apostle of 
intellectual independence, a Puritan of the Puritans. 
To Montaigne virtue is a struggle, though he rec- 
ognizes that there are characters, like Socrates, 
who breathe virtue as native air. 5 Emerson is one 
of these characters. 

' IV, 336. 

' IV, 337. 

3 VIII, 295. 

'* Essays, Book I, ch. xxii. 

^ Essays, 11, 11. Contrast Emerson, 11, 133. 

156 



MONTAIGNE 

In their way of looking at life, and their ap- 
proach to writing down their thoughts, there is a 
good deal of similarity. Montaigne's book is a 
perfect self -revelation, written to please the writer 
in the first place, with small thought of posterity. 
Both men try to preserve a balance, due to seeing 
a subject from more than one point of view. Both 
like the bold and unexpected phrase, and recognize 
the power of the hard speech of common men.' 
Both use illustrations freely, though Montaigne's 
are so often drawn from the Latin and Greek 
authors that he may be said to carry classicism to 
an extreme. Both defend free borrowing of 
material.^ Both are desultory in style — the 
Frenchman again passing the other by several 
lengths. Montaigne says : " As things come into 
my head I heap them in ... I let myself jog on 
at my own rate and ease." ^ There is indeed no 
telling from the title what the given essay has to 

^ " I love stout expressions among gallant men, and to have 
them speak as they think ; we must fortify and harden our hear- 
ing against this tenderness as to ceremonious sound of words. 
I love a strong and manly familiarity and converse." Montaigne, 
Essays, in, S. Cf. Emerson : •' Blacksmiths and teamsters do 
not trip in their speech; it is a shower of bullets." iv, i68. 

^Essays, "On Books," ii, lo: Hazlitt, p. 212. Cf. Emerson, 
VIII, 191. 

^Hazlitt's Montaigne, p. 213 : Book li, ch. x. 



EMERSON 

offer. Both are desultory readers, as well.' And 
both surrender themselves to truth, and are afraid 
they have missed it when men begin to praise 
them. 

" I embrace and caress truth in what hand 
soever I find it, and cheerfully surrender myself, 
and extend to it my conquered arms . . . take a 
pleasure in being reproved, and accommodate 
myself to my accusers ... 't is a dull and hurtful 
pleasure to have to do with people who admire us, 
and approve of all we say." ^ 

It would be hard to show that Emerson has 
transferred many thoughts from Montaigne. Miss 
Grace Norton, in "The Spirit of Montaigne," ^ 
musters four examples, but only one of these is at 
all striking, and this, dealing as it does with the 
art of living well, may just as well have been sug- 
gested to Emerson by Thoreau. It would not 
be difficult to match this accidental parallelism. 
Emerson's poor opinion of travel is well known, 
Montaigne's less so : " On telling Socrates that 

' " Twenty years since I have stuck to any one book an hour 
together." Essays, iii, 8: Hazlitt, p. 461. 

^ Montaigne, Essays, in, 8 : Hazlitt, pp. 453, 454. Cf. Emer- 
son, II, 118. Hazlitt's note shows that Montaigne's sentiment 
came from Plutarch, who quotes from Antisthenius. 

^Boston and New York, 1908. 

158 



MONTAIGNE 

such a one was nothing improved by his travels, * I 
very well believe it,' said he, * for he took himself 
along with him.' " ' Both say the intellect is 
cheerful.'^ Both recognize that wine may stimulate 
to poetic composition, though Emerson perceives 
that the great poet depends on the stimulation 
that comes from within.^ 

The fact is that these two writers, whatever 
their superficial resemblances, looked at life with 
such different selves behind the eyes, that although 
the angle of approach is somewhat the same, their 
mental content is almost entirely different. There 
was attraction for Emerson in finding one who 
dared to be frank, and dared to please himself. 
When the more refined nature had gained robust- 
ness of style through this Gallic impact, the book 
from which he had received the rhetorical impulse 
lost much of its charm. For Montaigne lacks 
what is a vital part of Emerson's make-up, the 
aspiration to "live in the spirit." In his masterly 
essay on Montaigne, Emerson gives almost nothing 
of biography, but defends the sceptical spirit as a 
balance to the idealist's ready acceptance of funda- 

^ Essays, i, 38 : Hazlitt, p. 129. Cf. Emerson, 11, 81. 

^ " The most certain sign of wisdom is a continued cheerful- 
ness." Essays, i, 25 : Hazlitt, p. 93. Cf. Emerson, xil, 416. 

3 Essays, 11, 2: Hazlitt, p. 185. Cf. Emerson, III, 27, 28. 



EMERSON 

mental unity. But when, toward the close, the 
author speaks about his own kind of scepticism, 
it turns out to be the scepticism that drives the 
spiritualist to newer and newer affirmations of 
the soul, while his followers would linger in the 
old formulas — perhaps burn their master at the 
stake. Of such spirituality Montaigne has little 
or nothing. 



1 60 



X 

THE INFLUENCE OF EMERSON 



THE INFLUENCE OF EMERSON 

By this time the answer to the question with 
which we started begins to appear. That question 
was whether the contribution of Emerson to litera- 
ture is primarily that of a revealer of new thought 
or of an inspirer to accept and follow the tried and 
true. The pre-utterance of his ideas by saints and 
sages of the older time has prepared us to answer 
the question by crediting Emerson with an un- 
common degree of that quality which inspires 
others to belief and action. A chief function of 
his life is in fecundating other minds. But before 
a final and comprehensive statement is attempted, 
let us make vivid the nature and extent of Emer- 
son's influence by citing actual instances of its 
workings upon other men. 

This influence reached those who were not in 
literary callings as well as those whose habits of 
thought were along lines like his own. The 
scientist, Tyndall, declared : "If any one can be 
said to have given the impulse to my mind, it is 
Emerson ; whatever I have done, the world owes 
to him." Dr. C. H. Henderson, at the fortieth 
annual convention of the Free Religious Associa- 

163 



EMERSON 

tion of America, quoted from Luther Burbank, the 
celebrated grower of artificial fruits, the acknowl- 
edgment that his activities were stimulated and 
made possible by Emerson's teachings. ' Charles 
W. Eliot, ex-president of Harvard University, emi- 
nent educator and man of affairs, says : "As a 
young man I found the writings of Emerson unat- 
tractive, and not seldom unintelligible. . . . But 
when I had got at what proved to be my lifework 
for education, I discovered in Emerson's poems 
and essays all the fundamental motives and princi- 
ples of my own hourly struggle against educational 
routine and tradition." ^ Horace Greeley, journalist 
and publicist, gave credit for whatever was striking 
or forcible in his views *'to the free-spoken pro- 
found thinkers of our age ; and foremost among 
them to Ralph Waldo Emerson and the little band 
of earnest, clear-sighted spirits who are commonly 
known by the contemptuous appellation of Tran- 
scendentalists." ^ 

In Colonel T. W. Higginson's address at the 
Emerson Centenary in Concord, he quoted from 
an early lecture a passage concerning the power of 

' " Proceedings at the Fortieth Annual Meeting of the Free 
Religious Association of America." Boston, 1907. P. 87. 

'^Boston Herald, May 25, 1903. 

^ Lecture on the " Formation of Character." 

164 



INFLUENCE 

youth to be lord of a day, and added : " Fifty years 
ago there must have been more than a thousand 
men and women in America and in England who 
could look back on that passage, as I did, and say 
of it, 'At any rate, it w^as the making of me.' " ' 
At another time he wrote concerning the Phi Beta 
Kappa Address of 1837: "To me, I know, the 
whole College Library became a servant, not a 
master, from that moment." ^ The case is well 
known of Moncure D. Conway, who, from reading 
a few sentences of the essay on History, arose to 
change the whole course of his life.^ Frank B. 
Sanborn, an intimate associate of Emerson's later 
years, hails him as '* the philosopher who uttered 
for me the secret of the universe." -^ Bronson Alcott 
testified : " I must say [of the hours passed with 
Emerson] that for me they have made ideas pos- 
sible." Leslie Stephen wrote : "I can never read 
his writings without becoming, for the time at 
least, a better man." 

So far, except Colonel Higginson, the persons 
quoted have testified each for himself. There is 
another company who speak for more than one, 

^ Printed account of proceedings, p. 65. 
^ T/ie Outlook, May 23, 1903, p. 226. 
^ Conway's Memoir of Emerson, p. 3. 
'' The Critic, May, 1903. 

165 



EMERSON 

going back to Lowell, who said of Emerson as a 
lecturer, " He brought us life." ' M. D. Conway 
says of Thoreau that he " was the most complete 
incarnation of the early idealism of the sage," and 
ascribes the poetry of Jones Very and its cessa- 
tion to the presence and withdrawal of Emerson's 
stimulating power, adding : " [Very] has himself 
said as much." ^ John Burroughs (like E. C. Sted- 
man) finds the resemblance between the funda- 
mental principles of Emerson and Walt Whitman 
too striking to be accidental. Burroughs says, 
" Whitman is Emerson translated from the abstract 
to the concrete." W. Robertson Nicoll attests 
**the mighty force with which Emerson acted on 
the minds of young men in Scotland in the '6o's," ^ 
and a company of Scotch and English admirers 
sent a memorial to the Centenary at Concord, 
including this : " Many bir his writings have been a 
life-long inspiration to people of the Anglo-Saxon 
nation all over the world." ^ George W. Smalley, 

^"Emerson the Lecturer," My Study Windows, vol. ii, p. 379. 
Boston, 1 888. 

^ D. A. Page's Life of Thoreau, p. 263. Conway's Memoir of 
Emerson. 

3 Quoted by G. P. Morris in the Boston Transcript, May 23, 
1903. 

'^Proceedings, p. iii. 

166 



INFLUENCE 

London correspondent of New York newspapers, 
recalls a personal interview he as a law student had 
with Emerson at Concord. He quotes the advice 
that the elder man gave to the younger two be- 
fore him, in "the resonant tones of the platform " 
..." tones which were meant to find their way, 
and did find their way, to the hearts of his hearers ; 
an appeal to the emotions, to the conscience, to 
whatever there was in these thousands, or in the 
single individual, sympathetic to the speaker. I 
have never forgotten them. ... It had an effect 
and the effect has been permanent." ' Bliss 
Carman tells of Emerson's steadying influence 
on young men, twenty-five years ago : " We per- 
ceived that while the signs and vestments of our 
paternal religion might vanish like smoke, the 
breath of goodness at the core of things remained 
potent and quickening as before." ^ No better 
account can be found of Emerson's vital sympathy 
with the young, and his influence upon them, than 
that of Charles J. Woodbury, in his " Talks with 
Ralph Waldo Emerson." ^ 

' 7%<? Literary Digest, March 27, igoQ*. Quoted from the 
New York Tribune. 

^ Quoted by G. P. Morris in the Boston Transcript, May 23, 
1903. 

3 Boston (?) and London, 1S90. 

167 



EMERSON 

Other persons who have been influenced by 
Emerson are Louisa Alcott, Frederika Bremer, 
Arthur Hugh Clough, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
Herman Grimm, Ellery Channing (the poet), Helen 
Hunt Jackson, Maria Lowell, Gerald Stanley Lee, 
John Albee, Professor Hugo Miinsterberg, and 
John Burroughs. In every case, the testimony- 
comes either directly from the person concerned or 
from an outside source that is trustworthy.' These 
names are selected because the persons indicated 
are known beyond the private circle, though the 
list of public and semi-public characters is not 
therewith exhausted. They are but examples of a 
countless and unascertainable number of men and 
women, who, reading Emerson, or in former time 
hearing him, have responded to his call. 

It already appears, from the language of some of 
the quotations, what was the nature of Emerson's 
influence. Matthew Arnold once phrased him as 
the friend and aider of those who would live in the 
spirit. Each man must find the great Spirit for 
himself ; it is accessible to all ; Emerson therefore 
directed each man to listen to the best part of 

^ See G. P. Morris in the Boston Transcript for May 23, 1903 ; 
Preface to trans, by Miss Adams of Grimm's " Goethe " ; Fred- 
erika Bremer, "Homes of the New World," pp. 154, 156, 162; 
" Mosses from an Old Manse " ; Walter Lewis's " Introduction 
to Emerson's Poems," pub. by W. Scott, p. 444; etc. 

168 



INFLUENCE 

himself — to listen to the God within. It is in the 
wonderful force with which he led and inspired 
men to be their best selves that his influence essen- 
tially consists. Nor shall we lack ample evidence 
that this is the case. Mrs. Ednah D. Cheney, in 
her " Personal Reminiscences," ' says : " He always 
comes to me as a vital influence." Charles Brad- 
laugh, the English Socialist, said : " I ascribe to 
Mr. Emerson's essay on Self-Reliance my first step 
in the career I have adopted." ^ President CaroHne 
Hazard finds in Emerson the call to women " to 
awaken to their own personality, to a conception 
of the worth of their own souls and the right 
that they had to live their own lives." ^ Moorfield 
Storey, a well-known Boston lawyer, also states 
the message to young men of his day to have been 
a call to each " to serve society as only he could 
do." 4 This message came with power. Colonel 
T. W. Higginson describes Emerson's life as " the 
life which becomes at its highest moments a source 
of vital influence." ^ Julian Schmidt asked himself 

^ Unity, May 14, 1903; quoted by G. P. Morris in the Boston 
Transcript, May 23, 1903. 

^Life of Bradlaugh, by his daughter; chapter, "First Lecture 
Tour in America." 

3 " Emerson Centenary," p. loi. 

*' Ibid, p. 105. ^ Ibid, p. 64. 

169 



EMERSON 

what he had learned, after reading the essays, and 
answered, " I have really learned a great deal ; be- 
sides, without knowing it, and above everything 
else, my very thoughts have taken on a higher 
flight." ' Professor A. S. Hill expresses substan- 
tially the same benefit : " A listener, to be sure, 
sometimes carried away nothing which he could 
put into words, but he took out of the room a 
better self than he had brought into it ; for a time 
his whole being had been lifted above its ordinary 
level, as by an hour of fine music, or an hour on a 
mountain or by the sea."^ In Grant Duff's read- 
able *' Notes from a Diary " ^ occurs an anecdote 
of ex-President Garfield, related by the late Edwin 
Atkinson. Garfield said that the beginning of his 
intellectual life was a lecture delivered by Emerson 
at Williamstown. The lecture excited Garfield to 
such a degree that afterward the hill above the 
village seemed in a blaze, and he lay awake recall- 
ing what he had heard, but remembering the single 
sentence, '' Mankind is as lazy as it dares to be." 

That sentence was probably the one utterance 
that the life of Garfield then needed ; for in truth 

' " Neue Essays," Einleitung. 

^"The Influence of Emerson, p. 34. Harvard Studies and 
Notes in Philosophy and Literature, v. 

3 London, 1900; under date June 23, 1887. 
170 



INFLUENCE 

Emerson was, as the legend under his bust in the 
Second Church in Boston says, not only " Fear- 
less " and *' Calm," but " Inspiring." Emerson's 
vitalizing influence, as has been so often declared, 
is in the direction of spiritual things. ** There is 
in Emerson an inflaming religious quality which 
reaches the soul of his reader with singular power ; 
his morals are not merely morals, they are morals 
on fire." ' Self-reliance, at basis reliance upon 
God, may lead to worthiest achievement ; this was 
his message. '' The point of any pen can be an 
epitome of reality ; the commonest person's act, if 
genuinely actuated, can lay hold on eternity." ^ 

^'•A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson." J. B. Thayer, 
Boston, 18S4. P. 130. 

^ William James, " Emerson Centenar}^" p. 76. 



71 



XI 

SUMMARY 



SUMMARY 

The conclusion of the whole matter is that the 
essential doctrines of Emerson were not, as doc- 
trines, original with him. The immanence of God 
had been preached in India more than two thousand 
years before. It was assumed by the current 
ideaHsm, and in Schelling, as in Emerson, took the 
form of the identity of nature-stuff with mind-stuff. 
Hints of self-reliance had been dropped in Persia 
and India, as well as by Schelling, Goethe, and 
an American follower of Swedenborg. The basis 
of the essay on Compensation — if any further 
illustrations are needed than those given in the 
essay itself — may be sought in Kant or Plato, or 
even in Hafiz and the Vedas. The doctrine of 
correspondence may have come out of Schelling or 
Swedenborg.' These truths of the ages were ex- 
pressed by Emerson in a vital style that carried 
them to men's bosoms and business. 

Is the contribution of Emerson to literature of 
less value on this account ? Not so. It has not 

^Emerson's view of nature was shared by Mozoomdar, Car- 
lyle, Goethe, and others. In Plato, Hafiz, and Saadi he found 
optimism. William Ellery Channing preached self-reliance; 
Goethe, Hafiz, and Montaigne practiced it. 



EMERSON 

seemed of high importance to try to prove in each 
case (what in some cases would have been impos- 
sible) that Emerson found a given doctrine in this 
or that author who contained what might have been 
to him a suggestion of it. Indeed, many times 
Emerson may have seemed to himself an originator, 
despite his formal approval of the borrower who 
can assimilate what he finds. It is not necessary 
to the present purpose to show whether Emerson 
was aware in a given case that he had seen a 
thought expressed before. Certainly he was a dis- 
criminating reader, rejecting as well as accepting. 
The main contention is that Emerson's chief doc- 
trines — the mould in which his mind was cast — 
are not new. 

What, then, is the contribution of this influential 
writer to the literature of the world } We have 
already seen what it is. It is an inspiring influ- 
ence leading to spiritual things. The doctrines 
remained dead, in books. Emerson uttered them, 
and they became the breath of life. He said, 
*' Trust thyself," and straightway a great multitude, 
whom no man can number, stood upon their feet, 
and obeyed each the voice of God as it spoke to 
him. Instead of conveying a system of thought, 
destined like other systems of thought to be out- 
grown, Emerson called upon men to obey their 
highest leading, and thus march each for himself 
176 



SUMMARY 

upon the particular road that opens to self-develop- 
ment and service. The message, interpreted in 
specific terms by each listener, becomes a different 
course of life for each, but a life governed by the 
same high motive. The cheer and the power and 
the utterance with which the message came were 
Emerson's own. These are greater than a mere 
doctrine would have been. For doctrines come 
and go with the ages, but life begets life, and so 
begets action. 



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